Tag: NSA

24 December 1999

Posted on by William Arkin
NSA

 

NSA reportedly begins placing caveats on certain raw Osama bin Ladin intercepts that precludes automatic sharing of the contents with the FBI or U.S. Attorneys.

These controls over dissemination were initially created at the direction of Attorney General Janet Reno, and applied solely to intelligence gathered as a result of three specific domestic-related intercepts that she had authorized. Because NSA decided it was administratively too difficult to determine whether particular intelligence derived from these specific surveillances was contained in finished reports, the NSA also decided to control dissemination of all its bin Laden related reports.

In November 2000, in response to direction from the FISA Court, NSA modified these caveats to require that NSA’s Customer Needs and Delivery Services group could make exceptions to share the resulting intelligence with prosecutors and FBI agents. This episode is often confused with the larger question of FBI and CIA sharing—the so-called “wall”—but really it’s related to intelligence from three al Qaeda suspect intercepts.

25 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

The Washington Times reports that the NSA issued a top-secret intelligence report on the day the destroyer USS Cole was attacked in Yemen—the alert warning that terrorists were planning an attack against the United States in the Middle East. It isn’t the first (or last) time that NSA was implicated in possessing intelligence that provided tactical warning but never got disseminated in time or sent to the right people.

Bill Gertz reports that the NSA report was not dispatched until several hours after the bombing. The report, according to officials who were familiar with the top-secret intelligence, stated that unidentified terrorists were involved in “operational planning” for an attack on U.S. or Israeli personnel or property in the Middle East. One official said the warning was specific as to an attack in Yemen. Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican and a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, agreed that the NSA report was specific. He investigated the NSA warning and later told Gertz that the warning “related specifically to Yemen.” (Breakdown, p. 51)

Is it true? What’s more important is that through 9/11 (and about 9/11) we just don’t know what intelligence NSA possessed or reported because the signals intelligence (SIGINT) agency evades deep scrutiny, even after disasters. And history is distorted, at least U.S. history, by the absence of much information on the substance of intelligence reporting: what the IC knows, what subject matters it collects on, what happens to the intelligence. Intelligence leaders are always ready to boast that intelligence on this and that saved lives, but the substance is really a black hole.

16 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden

 

NSA director Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden announces a major reorganization at the upper reaches of his agency. The changes, he says, are designed to enable top managers to focus on reengineering signals intelligence in the face of rapidly changing communications technology, particularly the move from radio wave intercepts to digital intercept and exploitation.

Speaking at a computer security conference in Baltimore, Hayden says that cyberspace had become as important a potential battlefield as any other. He said that digital cyberspace—not just Internet-connected computers and systems but also computer networks—held out as much prospect for offense as well as defense. “It is a place where we must ensure American security as surely as land, sea, air and space,” Hayden said.

Twenty years later, the statement seems both prescient and archaic in that it could be as much said today, with the U.S. government still struggling to establish the capabilities and the rules of the road for intelligence collection and action in cyberspace. But then the reality was that the “retooling” was driven as much by old sources of intercepts drying up, or at least becoming less of a priority than data transiting digital networks.