Government Gone Wild, Part 7 - Government Spying Success Stories That Are Not Success Stories

This is the seventh in a series of “government gone wild” posts regarding the unprecedented spying on Americans by the Federal government that has come to light over the past few weeks. This effort has resulted in gross violations of Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights and intrusion into the privacy of every American citizen.

This scandal has drawn realistic comparisons to the Big Brother entity in George Orwell’s novel, “1984,” which is not a good thing. Big Brother was the symbol of an all-encompassing dictatorial regime that squashed every citizens’ freedom. With recent disclosure that the Obama administration was using the assets and information of the IRS to destroy, harass, and hinder the First Amendment rights of those political opponents who dared to have a difference of opinion with his polices, this Orwell analogy takes on even greater validity.

Which gets us today’s two questions of discussion:

1. Given that this widespread snooping and invasion of privacy was immoral and unconstitutional, was it even effective?
2. What could would-be terrorists do to avoid this massive data snatch?

1) The website, Liberty Update did an article on June 11, 2013 that listed several ways that an American could minimize the intrusion and snooping by the government into one’s electronic communications:

• To keep one’s internet browsing history private, a person could go into private mode on their Web browsers, most of which have the ability to allow you to search privately, without cookies being used to track your movements; you could also use browser extensions like Ghostery, Abine’s Do Not Track and AVG’s Do Not Track that prevent “invisible” entities from tracking searches as well. You can hide your IP address at a higher level of security by hiding your computer’s IP address entirely using several commercially available services such as, Hot Spot Shield, which is a VPN (virtual private network) software, and the search engine StartPage. The website says you can go hard core with ‘Tor’ which is free software that enables not only browsing that is anonymous but it encrypts data transport and doesn’t reveal a user’s location or how long they were browsing.
• To keep one’s files secure, the website suggests not using cloud computing resources.
• To secure your mobile phone information from snooping you can use a technology such as TrustChip, which is placed into the micro SD slot of your mobile phone device for mobile phone activity encryption.
• According to the article, the Washington Post recently pointed to online telephone service Silent Circle, a Skype-like service, which has been proven to have end-to-end encryption of information without any backdoors for wiretapping.
• To avoid having you movements tracked by tracing your cell phone locations, simply leaving your cell phone home will disguise where you have physically been.

I am not going to execute any of these steps since I believe that as an American, I should not have to shield my electronic communications from the government. However, if this type of encryption and disguising information is so readily available online, do we really think that potential terrorists are not already taking these steps to hide their intentions from the NSA?

2) On June 14, 2013, the Associated Press ran a similar article that showed the various ways to hide your electronic activities from the government:

• For emails, the article recommends using PGP, which is an abbreviation for “Pretty Good Privacy.” PGP is so good that the U.S. government tried to block its export in the mid-1990s, stating that the software was so powerful it should be classed as a weapon.
• The article also recommends using TOR or leaving your cell phone behind to disguise activities.
• Another suggestion is to not use credit cards, paying with cash instead, since the cards’ usage is easily tracked and various news stories have asserted that the Federal government has already been tracking credit card purchase patterns.
• The AP writers suggest not storing your computer data within the United States since it might be subjected to U.S. laws and warrants, with Iceland being a suggested place to park you information.

Again, if the Associated Press knows about these methods to concealing one’s electronic activity, is the Federal government so naïve to think potential terrorists do not also know about these safeguards? And given that many of these terrorists are sponsored by rogue nations, e.g. Iran, these nations might have provided even more sophisticated methods to hiding one’s electronic tracks.

3) According to an extensive investigative article in the U.K. Guardian newspaper on June 12, 2013, the Obama administration’s assertion that the NSA snooping program called PRISM was a major reason why authorities were led to the arrest and convict would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi in 2009 and David Headley, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for his role in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks India.

Two Washington politicians, Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, and her equivalent in the House, Mike Rogers, have been the Washington political class cheerleaders of this premise. According to the article Rogers made his assertion of how vlauable he NSA PRISM data spying program was on an ABC news show this past weekend and that other administration officials have been planting the same seed behind closed doors.

However, the Guardian’s investigation uncovered the exact opposite, i.e. the PRISM contribution to the arrests and convictions were a minor part, if that, in the whole operation to prevent terrorism. Their extensive work can be accessed at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/12/nsa-surveillance-data-terror-attack?guni=Network+front%3Anetwork-front+aux-1+top-stories-1%3ABento+box+8+col%3APosition1%3Asublinks


As usual, the mainstream press in the U.S. is not following up on this story and doing the good, solid journalism work that the Guardian and other british newspapers have been doing int his area. Rather than review their extensive work here. I will pull out a few conclusions and quotes from the Guardian and allow you peruse the entire article on your own:

• “But court documents lodged in the US and UK, as well as interviews with involved parties, suggest that data-mining through Prism and other NSA programs played a relatively minor role in the interception of the two plots.”
• “Conventional surveillance techniques, in both cases including old-fashioned tip-offs from intelligence services in Britain, appear to have initiated the investigations.“
• “But the lawyer said he was skeptical that mass data sweeps could explain what led law enforcement to Zazi.”
• "The government says that it does not monitor content of these communications in its data collection. So I find it hard to believe that this would have uncovered Zazi's contacts with a known terrorist in Pakistan," Dowling said.
• ‘An intelligence expert and former CIA operative, who asked to remain anonymous because he had been directly involved in the Headley case, was derisive about the claim that data-mining sweeps by the NSA were key to the investigation. "That's nonsense. It played no role at all in the Headley case. That's not the way it happened at all," he said.'
• “The intelligence expert said that it was a far more ordinary lead that ensnared Headley. British investigators spotted him when he contacted an informant.”
• “Headley was also subject to a plethora of more conventionally obtained intelligence that questions the central role claimed for the NSA's data sweeps behind his arrest.”

You get the idea, and you can get the full details at the site listed above. If you believe the Guardian’s investigation, the NSA snooping had little to do with serving justice in these two cases, it was basically traditional, street level, intelligence gathering, informant creating work that broke these two cases, not massive anonymous NSA data sweeps. If these are the BEST examples that this administration can come up with to justify the destruction of the Fourth Amendment, then I would say they have a very weak case.

4) And finally ask yourself this: if this program is so good, how come it did not detect the two young Chechnyans that blew up the finish line at the Boston Marathon, even though foreign intelligence services had already told the U.S. intelligence community to be on the lookout for them?

If this program is so good, how come it did not identify the Fort Hood shooter ahead of time, before he killed about a dozen soldiers and citizens and wounded dozens of others, even though this terrorist was in electronic contact with a known terrorist leader in Yemen?

If this program is so good, how come it did not prevent David Headley and his cohorts from pulling off the massive terror attack in Mumbai? Why claim success with him, like the administration is doing, when success did not result in the loss of life and destruction of property in the Mumbai attacks?

I keep going back to the quote we showed in this series from a former head of the Israeli intelligence service. He said in the war on terror, you can win all the battles and still lose the war. If we allow these types of government electronic communications intrusions and the destruction of our privacy to continue, we will still lose the war since we ourselves would have destroyed our freedom and liberty from within, even if the supposed outcome of the Big Brother snooping was effective, which apparently it is not.

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