A treasure hunt: is Scott Shane hiding the real NSA jewels among GCHQ documents he received from The Guardian and, if so, what are they?
As diaried by jamess, Scott Shane of the New York Times reported new material about the NSA from documents obtained via the Guardian from Edward Snowden.
Superficially, this was a huge scoop, detailing (amid plenty of legitimate activity) surveillance against UN General Secretary Ban Ki Moon and the Climate Change Summit, computer hacking through Tailored Access Operations, and dragnet interception programs called Dishfire, Polar Breeze, Tracfin, Ghosthunter, and Snacks. The NSA has taken hostile action against governments with whom we are not at war, placing itself in the position of making rather than serving national policy. Most damning of all, the Shane article makes it clear that for all the spying, the NSA has done precious little to enhance American security. So much of the spying is focused on friends and ordinary Americans/allies/trading partners that the agency isn't even translating much of the foreign language communications between terrorists, or at least in areas of the world where terrorists are concentrated.
And yet the reaction to the Shane report by Wikileaks, as reported on DemocracyNow [sorry, the transcript is incomplete at the time of this writing; see Joe Pompeo, Yahoo], is that the Shane piece is a "limited hangout," a partial exposure designed to get everything out in a relatively innocuous form and squelch reporting by other news outlets. So the question arises: what is the Shane article missing?
Some excerpts from Shane:
The N.S.A. seems to be listening everywhere in the world, gathering every stray electron that might add, however minutely, to the United States government’s knowledge of the world.
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The agency’s Dishfire database — nothing happens without a code word at the N.S.A. — stores years of text messages from around the world, just in case. Its Tracfin collection accumulates gigabytes of credit card purchases. The fellow pretending to send a text message at an Internet cafe in Jordan may be using an N.S.A. technique code-named Polarbreeze to tap into nearby computers. The Russian businessman who is socially active on the web might just become food for Snacks, the acronym-mad agency’s Social Network Analysis Collaboration Knowledge Services, which figures out the personnel hierarchies of organizations from texts.
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By many accounts, the agency provides more than half of the intelligence nuggets delivered to the White House early each morning in the President’s Daily Brief ....
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[As evidence that the primary focus of NSA spying is economic] The extent of Sigint sharing can be surprising: “N.S.A. may pursue a relationship with Vietnam,” one 2009 G.C.H.Q. document reported. But a recent G.C.H.Q. training document suggests that not everything is shared, even between the United States and Britain. “Economic well-being reporting,” it says, referring to intelligence gathered to aid the British economy, “cannot be shared with any foreign partner.”
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The N.S.A.’s elite Transgression Branch, created in 2009 ...quietly piggybacks on others’ incursions into computers of interest....
In one 2010 hacking operation code-named Ironavenger, for instance, the N.S.A. spied simultaneously on an ally and an adversary.
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Venezuela, for instance, was one of six “enduring targets” in N.S.A.’s official mission list from 2007, along with China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Russia. The United States viewed itself in a contest for influence in Latin America with Venezuela’s leader then, the leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez, who allied himself with Cuba, and one agency goal was “preventing Venezuela from achieving its regional leadership objectives and pursuing policies that negatively impact U.S. global interests.”
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An N.S.A. officer in Texas, in other words, was paid each day to peruse the private messages of obscure Venezuelan bureaucrats, hunting for tidbits that might offer some tiny policy edge.
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One N.S.A. officer on the Lashkar-e-Taiba beat let slip that some of his eavesdropping turned out to be largely pointless, perhaps because of the agency’s chronic shortage of skilled linguists.
Wikileaks
tweeted a harsh response, calling The New York Times a tool of the Pentagon and saying:
So what is missing from the NYT story? One clue might be to follow Wikileaks tweets. So far, the main topic seems to be Stratfor files on the
the Philippines.
Another avenue is to look at what NYT competitors have to say. The Guardian live blog is here. Paul Owens' observations date to about 8:30AM Eastern. On a quick scan, I didn't see anything about the Shane article in Der Spiegel.
So join the hunt! Where in the world is the missing or decontextualized information? Let's crowdsource some journalism.
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Updates
* Bob Swern mentions an article by Ewen MacAskill and James Ball in The Guardian. It looks like it was written with assistance from Scott Shane. On a skim, I don't see anything new in it.
* Dumbo reports some defects in links/images. I have tried to fix them. If they don't work, they don't work. Sorry.