Keeping
the NSA in Perspective
Geopolitical Weekly
Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - 04:01
Stratfor
Keeping
the NSA in Perspective is republished with permission of
Stratfor."
By George Friedman
NSA Data Central: Bluffdale, Utah
In June 1942, the bulk of the Japanese fleet sailed to seize
the Island of Midway. Had Midway fallen, Pearl Harbor would have been at risk
and U.S. submarines, unable to refuel at Midway, would have been much less
effective. Most of all, the Japanese wanted to surprise the Americans and draw
them into a naval battle they couldn't win.
The Japanese fleet was vast. The Americans had two carriers
intact in addition to one that was badly damaged. The United States had only
one advantage: It had broken Japan's naval code and thus knew a great deal of
the country's battle plan. In large part because of this cryptologic advantage,
a handful of American ships devastated the Japanese fleet and changed the
balance of power in the Pacific permanently.
This -- and the advantage given to the allies by penetrating
German codes -- taught the Americans about the centrality of communications
code breaking. It is reasonable to argue that World War II would have ended
much less satisfactorily for the United States had its military not broken
German and Japanese codes. Where the Americans had previously been guided to a
great extent by Henry Stimson's famous principle that "gentlemen do not
read each other's mail," by the end of World War II they were obsessed
with stealing and reading all relevant communications.
The National Security Agency evolved out of various post-war
organizations charged with this task. In 1951, all of these disparate efforts
were organized under the NSA to capture and decrypt communications of other
governments around the world -- particularly those of the Soviet Union, which
was ruled by Josef Stalin, and of China, which the United States was fighting
in 1951. How far the NSA could go in pursuing this was governed only by the
extent to which such communications were electronic and the extent to which the
NSA could intercept and decrypt them.
The amount of communications other countries sent
electronically surged after World War II yet represented only a fraction of
their communications. Resources were limited, and given that the primary threat
to the United States was posed by nation-states, the NSA focused on state
communications. But the principle on which the NSA was founded has remained,
and as the world has come to rely more heavily on electronic and digital
communication, the scope of the NSA's commission has expanded.
What drove all of this was Pearl Harbor. The United States
knew that the Japanese were going to attack. They did not know where or when.
The result was disaster. All American strategic thinking during the Cold War
was built around Pearl Harbor -- the deep fear that the Soviets would launch a
first strike that the United States did not know about. The fear of an
unforeseen nuclear attack gave the NSA leave to be as aggressive as possible in
penetrating not only Soviet codes but also the codes of other nations. You
don't know what you don't know, and given the stakes, the United States became
obsessed with knowing everything it possibly could.
In order to collect data about nuclear attacks, you must
also collect vast amounts of data that have nothing to do with nuclear attacks.
The Cold War with the Soviet Union had to do with more than just nuclear
exchanges, and the information on what the Soviets were doing -- what
governments they had penetrated, who was working for them -- was a global
issue. But you couldn't judge what was important and what was unimportant until
after you read it. Thus the mechanics of assuaging fears about a "nuclear
Pearl Harbor" rapidly devolved into a global collection system, whereby
vast amounts of information were collected regardless of their pertinence to
the Cold War.
There was nothing that was not potentially important, and a
highly focused collection strategy could miss vital things. So the focus grew,
the technology advanced and the penetration of private communications logically
followed. This was not confined to the United States. The Soviet Union, China,
the United Kingdom, France, Israel, India and any country with foreign policy
interests spent a great deal on collecting electronic information. Much of what
was collected on all sides was not read because far more was collected than
could possibly be absorbed by the staff. Still, it was collected. It became a
vast intrusion mitigated only by inherent inefficiency or the strength of the
target's encryption.
Justified
Fear
The Pearl Harbor dread declined with the end of the Cold War
-- until Sept. 11, 2001. In order to understand 9/11's impact, a clear memory
of our own fears must be recalled. As individuals, Americans were stunned by
9/11 not only because of its size and daring but also because it was
unexpected. Terrorist attacks were not uncommon, but this one raised another
question: What comes next? Unlike Timothy McVeigh, it appeared that al Qaeda
was capable of other, perhaps greater acts of terrorism. Fear gripped the land.
It was a justified fear, and while it resonated across the world, it struck the
United States particularly hard.
Part of the fear was that U.S. intelligence had failed again
to predict the attack. The public did
not know what would come next, nor did it believe that U.S. intelligence had
any idea. A federal commission on 9/11 was created to study the defense
failure. It charged that the president had ignored warnings. The focus in those
days was on intelligence failure. The CIA admitted it lacked the human sources
inside al Qaeda. By default the only way to track al Qaeda was via their
communications. It was to be the NSA's job.
As we have written, al Qaeda was a global, sparse and
dispersed network. It appeared to be tied together by burying itself in a vast
new communications network: the Internet. At one point, al Qaeda had
communicated by embedding messages in pictures transmitted via the Internet.
They appeared to be using free and anonymous Hotmail accounts. To find Japanese
communications, you looked in the electronic ether. To find al Qaeda's message,
you looked on the Internet.
But with a global, sparse and dispersed network you are looking
for at most a few hundred men in the midst of billions of people, and a few
dozen messages among hundreds of billions. And given the architecture of the
Internet, the messages did not have to originate where the sender was located
or be read where the reader was located. It was like looking for a needle in a
haystack. The needle can be found only if you are willing to sift the entire
haystack. That led to PRISM and other NSA programs.
The mission was to stop any further al Qaeda attacks. The
means was to break into their communications and read their plans and orders.
To find their plans and orders, it was necessary to examine all communications.
The anonymity of the Internet and the uncertainties built into its system meant
that any message could be one of a tiny handful of messages. Nothing could be
ruled out. Everything was suspect. This was reality, not paranoia.
It also meant that the NSA could not exclude the
communications of American citizens because some al Qaeda members were
citizens. This was an attack on the civil rights of Americans, but it was not
an unprecedented attack. During World War II, the United States imposed postal
censorship on military personnel, and the FBI intercepted selected letters sent
in the United States and from overseas. The government created a system of
voluntary media censorship that was less than voluntary in many ways. Most
famously, the United States abrogated the civil rights of citizens of Japanese
origin by seizing property and transporting them to other locations. Members of
pro-German organizations were harassed and arrested even prior to Pearl Harbor.
Decades earlier, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the
Civil War, effectively allowing the arrest and isolation of citizens without
due process.
There are two major differences between the war on terror
and the aforementioned wars. First, there was a declaration of war in World War
II. Second, there is a provision in the Constitution that allows the president
to suspend habeas corpus in the event of a rebellion. The declaration of war
imbues the president with certain powers as commander in chief -- as does
rebellion. Neither of these conditions was put in place to justify NSA programs
such as PRISM.
Moreover, partly because of the constitutional basis of the
actions and partly because of the nature of the conflicts, World War II and the
Civil War had a clear end, a point at which civil rights had to be restored or
a process had to be created for their restoration. No such terminal point
exists for the war on terror. As was witnessed at the Boston Marathon -- and in
many instances over the past several centuries -- the ease with which
improvised explosive devices can be assembled makes it possible for simple
terrorist acts to be carried out cheaply and effectively. Some plots might be
detectable by intercepting all communications, but obviously the Boston
Marathon attack could not be predicted.
The problem with the war on terror is that it has no
criteria of success that is potentially obtainable. It defines no level of
terrorism that is tolerable but has as its goal the elimination of all
terrorism, not just from Islamic sources but from all sources. That is simply
never going to happen and therefore, PRISM and its attendant programs will
never end. These intrusions, unlike all prior ones, have set a condition for
success that is unattainable, and therefore the suspension of civil rights is
permanent. Without a constitutional amendment, formal declaration of war or
declaration of a state of emergency, the executive branch has overridden
fundamental limits on its powers and protections for citizens.
Since World War II, the constitutional requirements for
waging war have fallen by the wayside. President Harry S. Truman used a U.N
resolution to justify the Korean War. President Lyndon Johnson justified an
extended large-scale war with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, equating it to a
declaration of war. The conceptual chaos of the war on terror left out any
declaration, and it also included North Korea in the axis of evil the United
States was fighting against. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is charged
with aiding an enemy that has never been legally designated. Anyone who might
contemplate terrorism is therefore an enemy. The enemy in this case was clear.
It was the organization of al Qaeda but since that was not a rigid nation but
an evolving group, the definition spread well beyond them to include any person
contemplating an infinite number of actions. After all, how do you define
terrorism, and how do you distinguish it from crime?
Three thousand people died in the 9/11 attacks, and we know
that al Qaeda wished to kill more because it has said that it intended to do
so. Al Qaeda and other jihadist movements -- and indeed those unaffiliated with
Islamic movements -- pose threats. Some of their members are American citizens,
others are citizens of foreign nations. Preventing these attacks, rather than
prosecuting in the aftermath, is important. I do not know enough about PRISM to
even try to guess how useful it is.
At the same time, the threat that PRISM is fighting must be
kept in perspective. Some terrorist threats are dangerous, but you simply
cannot stop every nut who wants to pop off a pipe bomb for a political cause.
So the critical question is whether the danger posed by terrorism is sufficient
to justify indifference to the spirit of the Constitution, despite the current
state of the law. If it is, then formally declare war or declare a state of
emergency. The danger of PRISM and other programs is that the decision to build
it was not made after the Congress and the president were required to make a
clear finding on war and peace. That was the point where they undermined the
Constitution, and the American public is responsible for allowing them to do
so.
Defensible
Origins, Dangerous Futures
The emergence of programs such as PRISM was not the result
of despots seeking to control the world. It had a much more clear, logical and
defensible origin in our experiences of war and in legitimate fears of real
dangers. The NSA was charged with stopping terrorism, and it devised a plan
that was not nearly as secret as some claim. Obviously it was not as effective
as hoped, or the Boston Marathon attack wouldn't have happened. If the program
was meant to suppress dissent it has certainly failed, as the polls and the
media of the past weeks show.
The revelations about PRISM are far from new or interesting
in themselves. The NSA was created with a charter to do these things, and given
the state of technology it was inevitable that the NSA would be capturing
communications around the world. Many leaks prior to Snowden's showed that the
NSA was doing this. It would have been more newsworthy if the leak revealed the
NSA had not been capturing all communications. But this does give us an
opportunity to consider what has happened and to consider whether it is
tolerable.
The threat posed by PRISM and other programs is not what has
been done with them but rather what could happen if they are permitted to
survive. But this is not simply about the United States ending this program.
The United States certainly is not the only country with such a program. But a
reasonable start is for the country that claims to be most dedicated to its
Constitution to adhere to it meticulously above and beyond the narrowest
interpretation. This is not a path without danger. As Benjamin Franklin said,
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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[My addendum to the above is below. Updated on July 18, 2013 to correct typos on my part. -- Brianroy]
http://www.geek.com/geek-cetera/nsa-gathers-data-equivalent-of-the-library-of-congress-contents-every-6-hours-1377151/
Note: The ff. videos (except for the last one) all pre-date June 13, 2013, soon after the scandal broke and was reported in the Foreign Media of Great Britain first. An example of what we thought we knew on June 6,7, 8, of 2013 thanks to the UK Guardian is available at:
June 6, 2013
June 8, 2013
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337863/PRISM-Google-Facebook-DID-allow-NSA-access-data-talks-set-spying-rooms-despite-denials-Zuckerberg-Page-controversial-project.html
The ff. Obama video was posted by the UK Guardian on June 6, 2013
Note: The ff. videos (except for the last one) all pre-date June 13, 2013, soon after the scandal broke and was reported in the Foreign Media of Great Britain first. An example of what we thought we knew on June 6,7, 8, of 2013 thanks to the UK Guardian is available at:
June 6, 2013
June 7, 201
June 8, 2013
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337863/PRISM-Google-Facebook-DID-allow-NSA-access-data-talks-set-spying-rooms-despite-denials-Zuckerberg-Page-controversial-project.html
The ff. Obama video was posted by the UK Guardian on June 6, 2013
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