NSA SAYS SURVEILLANCE FOILED 50 TERROR PLOTS

FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

NSA Chief: Surveillance Stopped More Than 50 Terror Plots
By Nick Simeone
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, June 18, 2013 - The director of the National Security Agency told Congress today more than 50 terrorist plots worldwide have been prevented since the 9/11 attacks through the classified surveillance programs the government uses to gather phone and Internet data, programs he said are legal and do not compromise the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.


Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander, who also commands U.S. Cyber Command, told the House Intelligence Committee he plans as early as tomorrow to provide lawmakers with classified details about the plots that were foiled in an effort to show how valuable the programs are to national security.

Alexander and other senior U.S. officials were called to testify in response to unauthorized disclosures to the media by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who revealed details about the agency's gathering of telephone numbers and the monitoring of Internet activity by foreigners overseas, leaks that Alexander said have caused irreversible and significant damage to the security of the United States and its allies.

Testifying alongside Alexander, Deputy FBI Director Sean Joyce discussed two terrorist plots that he said the surveillance programs helped to prevent. In one, emails intercepted from a terrorist in Pakistan helped to stop a plot to bomb New York City's subway system. Another involved a failed attempt by a known extremist in Yemen who conspired with a suspect in the United States to target the New York Stock Exchange. Both cases led to arrests and convictions, Joyce said.

"These programs are immensely valuable for protecting our nation and the security of our allies," Alexander said, and added that they may have helped to prevent the 9/11 attacks themselves if the government had the legal authority, as granted by the Patriot Act, to use them at the time.

The disclosure of the NSA programs has generated a nationwide debate over what techniques the government can legally use to monitor phone and Internet data to prevent terrorism without violating the privacy and civil liberties of Americans. Alexander and other senior U.S officials emphasized that the gathering of phone numbers that already are being collected by service providers as well as the tracking of U.S-based Internet servers used by foreigners are legal and repeatedly have been approved by the courts and Congress.

"These programs are limited, focused and subject to rigorous oversight," and their disciplined operation "protects the privacy and civil liberties of the American people," Alexander said.

The details of the foiled terror plots that he plans to provide to Congress will remove any doubt about the usefulness of the surveillance in keeping the homeland safe, the NSA director told the House panel.

"In the 12 years since the attacks on Sept. 11, we have lived in relative safety and security as a nation," he said. "That security is a direct result of the intelligence community's quiet efforts to better connect the dots and learn from the mistakes that permitted those attacks."

To prevent another damaging leak such as the breach caused by Snowden's disclosures, Alexander told lawmakers, the NSA is looking into where security may have broken down and for ways to provide greater oversight for the roughly 1,000 or so system administrators at NSA who have access to top secret information.

NSA CHIEF TELLS SENATE PANEL THAT LEAKS HAVE HURT NATIONAL SECURITY

FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

NSA Director: Security Leaks Have Done Great Harm

By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, June 14, 2013 - Leaks to the public about a classified National Security Agency terrorist surveillance program that collects data from the phone calls of Americans already have jeopardized national security, the NSA director told a Senate panel here June 12.


On June 6, from a hotel in Hong Kong where he had fled, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information to two newspapers about classified NSA surveillance practices.

Testifying before the full Senate Appropriations Committee with representatives from Homeland Security, the FBI and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander, who is also commander of U.S. Cyber Command, shared his concern for the nation.

"Great harm has already been done by opening this up, and the consequence, I believe, is [that] our security is jeopardized," Alexander said.

"There's no doubt in my mind," the general added, "that we will lose capabilities as a result of this, and that not only the United States, but those allies that we have helped, will no longer be as safe as they were two weeks ago."

Alexander said the surveillance program has disrupted or helped to disrupt in the United States and abroad "dozens of terrorist events," including the 2009 case of Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-American arrested as part of the 2009 U.S. al-Qaida group accused of planning suicide bombings on the New York City subway system.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper told the Senate in March that the NSA collection program was critical to discovery and disruption of the Zazi case. Discovery in the case began with phone data surveillance information based on operatives overseas, Alexander explained.

"We saw connections to a person in Colorado, and that was passed to the FBI. The FBI determined who that was -- Zazi -- and [associated] phone numbers," he said.

"The phone numbers on Zazi were the things that then allowed us to use the business-records [Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act] to go and find out connections from Zazi to other players throughout communities, specifically in New York City," the general added.

Alexander said he is seeking to determine, with help from the intelligence community and other administration officials, how more details can be declassified so the program can be more fully explained to the public.

"We now know that some of this [classified information] has been released," Alexander said. "So why does it make sense to explain to the American people so they have confidence that their government is doing the right thing? Because I believe we are, and we have to show them that."

The general added, "We have great people working under extremely difficult conditions to ensure the security of this nation and protect our civil liberties and privacy, ... [and] I would like the American people to know that, because they would be tremendously proud of the men and women of NSA who have done this for us for the last decade."

The issue, Alexander said, "is we then have to debate how much [information] we give out and what does that do to our future security? That's where the real debate is going to take place, because that's the issue that is now before us."

As they questioned Alexander and the other witnesses, some of the senators wanted to know how Snowden, a 29-year-old high-school and community-college dropout who held short-term and relatively low-level positions with the CIA, NSA and then was an NSA contractor, had access to such highly classified information.

Alexander noted that in the information technology arena, "some of these folks have tremendous skills to operate networks. That was [Snowden's] job for the most part, from 2009 to 2010, as an IT system administrator within those networks. He had great skills in that area."

But the general said he has grave concerns about Snowden's access and about potential breakdowns in the oversight process.

"I think what we have to do is come back and perhaps look at the oversight mechanism we have, ... the automated checks and balances that exist, and what we can do to improve those," he told the Senate panel.

The IT infrastructure was outsourced about 14 years ago, which provided more federal work in that area to contractors, Alexander noted. "As a consequence," he added, "many in government -- not just us -- have system administrators who are contractors working and running our networks."

Snowden was a system administrator with access to key parts of the network, Alexander said. "So we've got to address that," he acknowledged. "That is of serious concern to us, and something we have to fix."

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine addressed Alexander at one point during the hearing.

"I saw an interview in which Mr. Snowden claimed that due to his position at NSA he could tap into virtually any American's phone calls or emails," she said. "True or false?"

"False," the general replied. "I know of no way to do that."

The senators also asked Alexander how the NSA and other intelligence organizations could avoid the need to hire young people with so little experience to make up the future cyber workforce.

"In the military, we are going to hire young folks ... who graduate from high school to work in this area, and the key will be the training that we give them," the general said. "Ideally we'd like to get four years out of a top-notch engineering school for some of the military positions, but we won't get that, so we have a responsibility to bring them into the force and train them."

It takes several years to train people in this area, Alexander told the panel.

"So in effect, we're running a cyber college for many of our young enlisted folks to get them to the requisite skills," the general said.

On the NSA side, he added, it's easier to hire college graduates.

"What I need, I think, is greater scrutiny," the general said. "I need to go back and look at what I am getting with my contract support and what are their capabilities and how do we manage that from a government perspective. That's something I have concerns about."

HEAD OF NSA WANTS PUBLIC DEBATE OVER TERRORIST SURVEILLANCE

National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md.  Photo Credit:  NSA

FROM:  U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
NSA Chief Urges Public Debate of Terrorist Surveillance
By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, June 13, 2013 - Now that the existence of classified National Security Agency data-gathering efforts have been leaked to the public, the head of U.S. Cyber Command and NSA said yesterday he wants the public to understand the programs "so they can see what we're doing and what the results of it are."

Among the results, Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander told the full Senate Appropriations Committee, is the disruption or contributions to the disruption in the United States and abroad of "dozens of terrorist events."

Alexander testified along with interagency partners from the Homeland Security Department, the FBI and the National Institute of Standards and Technology during a hearing that U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, the committee chair, convened to discuss preparing for and responding to the enduring cyber threat.

But several senators -- given their first chance to question Alexander since NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information to newspapers June 6 about classified surveillance practices -- abruptly asked about the leaks and about legislation authorizing the practices.

In his leaks to the media, Snowden described two NSA surveillance programs authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Congress created in 2008. Section 702 of FISA authorizes access to records and other items of foreign targets located outside the United States under court oversight.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act broadened FISA to allow the FBI director or another high-ranking official there to apply for orders to produce telephone records, books and other materials to help with terrorism investigations.

Revelations about the programs have launched a debate nationwide about privacy, because Section 215 allows NSA to collect something called metadata -- information about call length and connections -- for phone calls that occur inside the United States and between the United States and other countries.

"These authorities complement each other in helping us identify different terrorist actions and ... disrupt them," Alexander told the senators. "If you want to get the content [of the phone calls], you'd have to get a court order. In any of these programs ... we [need] court orders for doing that, with oversight by Congress, by the courts and by the administration."

Some of the senators asked for details about terrorism cases that the NSA surveillance programs have helped, and Alexander named a few but said he intended to bring a classified list of them to today's closed session of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

But Alexander said he also wanted to provide an unclassified version -- if he could make that happen, he said -- this week that could be released to the public.

"I think this is an area where we have to give [Congress and the American people] the details. They need to understand it so they can see what we're doing and what the results of it are," he added.

"We all had this concern coming out of 9/11 -- how are we going to protect the nation," the general said, "because we did get intercepts on [Khalid Muhammad Abdallah al-Mihdhar], but we didn't know where he was. We didn't have the data collected to know that he was a bad person."

Mihdhar was one of five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 who flew that aircraft into the Pentagon as part of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"Because he was in the United States," Alexander continued, "the way we treated it [then] is that he's a U.S. person, so we had no information on him. If we didn't collect that [information] ahead of time, we couldn't make those connections."

Now through its surveillance programs, the NSA creates a set of telephone metadata from all over the United States, and only under specific circumstances can officials query the data, he said.

"And every time we do, it's auditable by the [congressional] committees, by the Justice Department, by the court and by the administration," Alexander said. "We get oversight from everybody on this."

The collection of U.S. telephone metadata is one of the elements that should be debated nationally, Alexander said, but he described why it was helpful in terrorism cases to do so.

"Let's take Mihdhar," he said. "[Congress] had authorized us to get Mihdhar's phones in California, but Mihdhar was talking to the other four teams [in other parts of the country].

"Today, under the business-record FISA, because we had stored that data in the database, we now have what we call reasonable, articulable suspicion. We could take that [phone] number and go backwards in time and see who he was talking to," the general continued. "And if we saw there were four other groups, we wouldn't know who those people were -- we'd only get the numbers. We'd say, 'This looks of interest,' and pass it to the FBI. We don't look at U.S. identities. We only look at the connections."

Alexander said he would like to see a nationwide debate on such topics for a couple of reasons.

"I think what we're doing to protect American citizens here is the right thing," he said. "Our agency takes great pride in protecting this nation and our civil liberties and privacy, and doing it in partnership with this committee, with this Congress, and with the courts. We aren't trying to hide it. We're trying to protect America, so we need your help in doing that. This isn't something that's just NSA or the administration. ... This is what our nation expects our government to do for us."

Alexander said he's not the only official involved in getting information declassified, but added, that if he can make it happen, he will.

"I do think what we're doing does protect American civil liberties and privacy," he told the Senate panel. "The issue is [that] to date, we've not been able to explain it, because it's classified, so that issue is something we're wrestling with."

"How do we explain this and still keep the nation secure?" he asked. "That's the issue that we have in front of us."