Government Executive - Authors - Brian Fung

Analysis: Are 50 Foiled Terrorist Plots Worth Your Privacy?

Brian Fung, National Journal — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:37:24 -0400

In the most candid explanation of the National Security Agency's surveillance program to date, agency head Gen. Keith Alexander said Tuesday that his organization's listening activity has helped foil more than 50 terrorist plots against the United States and its allies. One of those involved Najibullah Zazi's attempt to blow up the New York City subway; another concerned an early-stage plan, news of which was previously withheld from the public, to blow up the New York Stock Exchange.

Alexander and other witnesses before the House Intelligence Committee made sure to highlight key details of these foiled attacks. Understandably so: The more we focus on the program's successes, the less harshly we might be inclined to judge its alleged excesses. But what exactly is the tradeoff being made here, and how do these revelations address concerns about the potential for NSA over-spying?

We now know at least this much: Of the millions of phone numbers that the NSA could summon for intelligence purposes under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, about 300 specific numbers were actually "queried" from the database in the course of federal investigations. (This database is made up of the same telephone metadata Verizon has been handing over to the government on a daily basis since 2006, the subject of NSA leaker Edward Snowden's initial bombshell.) Twenty-two officials are responsible for approving these queries within the NSA, and the agency doesn't require special court authorization to inspect the phone numbers in question.

The NSA says it takes steps to rule out accidental snooping on U.S. citizens. Among the most important? Inspecting the area code, said John Inglis, the NSA's deputy director. If the number begins with "301," for example, you'd know it was a Maryland number.

"That would be your only insight as to whether this would be attributable to a U.S. person," Inglis said, adding that if the person was simply exercising their First Amendment right to free speech, "that is not a reason to approve a query."

Inglis didn't elaborate on how the NSA would go about determining whether the subject was in fact exercising free-speech rights (Would they send an agent to interview the suspect? Tap his lines?), but he assured lawmakers that the phone-records program had "a very narrow purpose."

(It's not entirely clear, but these minimization procedures seem to be separate from those applied to PRISM, the NSA surveillance program that summons data from tech companies under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.)

Yet despite Inglis's insistence that from this database the NSA can only retrieve phone numbers—and that "queries" approved by the 22 agency officials would return only those phone numbers that the first number dialed—statements by other officials at the hearing seemed to suggest that connecting metadata to specific individuals was a trivial matter.

Take one of the four cases the officials highlighted as plots disrupted by either the 215 program (the phone records) or the 702 program (the business records). Using the 215 program, said FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce, law-enforcement officials were able to positively identify an individual who was providing financial assistance to a listed terrorist group in Somalia. Not only that, but the FBI was also able to identify that suspect's coconspirators.

We already know that metadata acts as a kind of digital fingerprint, and it takes little more than a couple of data points to connect anonymized metadata to a specific person.

Even President Obama hinted at how flimsy the "it's only metadata" argument is in his interview with Charlie Rose last night:

"[Critics will] say, you know, 'You can—when you start looking at metadata, even if you don’t know the names, you can match it up, if there’s a call to an oncologist, and there’s a call to a lawyer, and—you can pair that up and figure out maybe this person’s dying, and they’re writing their will, and you can yield all this information.' All of that is true. Except for the fact that for the government, under the program right now, to do that, it would be illegal."

That any abuse of the system would be treated after the fact as a crime doesn't do anything to assuage Americans worrying that the crime is possible in the first place. It's also not outrageous to say, as my colleague Conor Friedersdorf does, that the tradeoff we've made between liberty and security is out of balance, and that maybe we've let our fear of terrorism get the better of us.

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The Taliban Is Ready for Peace Talks

Brian Fung, National Journal — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:23:42 -0400

U.S. officials have confirmed that the Taliban plans to open a political office in Doha, Qatar, for direct negotiations with the United States and the Afghan government. This comes just hours after after Afghan President Hamid Karzai shook hands with NATO's secretary-general in a ceremony returning day-to-day security responsibilities to Kabul.

The peace talks will begin in a matter of days, according to a senior administration official. Encouraging the Taliban to distance itself from al-Qaida and from international terrorism will be among the West's key goals. While the United States will play a facilitating role in the talks, negotiators from the Afghan High Peace Council will be taking the lead. The Taliban is expected to announce its new office later today.

The road to talks was established as early as March, when Karzai traveled to Qatar and reportedly discussedthe possibility of hosting discussions there with Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the emir of Qatar. But U.S. officials said this was the culmination of years of diplomatic work.

This isn't the first time Doha has been floated as a site for peace negotiations. Efforts to start talks have moved slowly. Senior U.S. officials Tuesday warned to expect the same this time, citing mutual distrust between the Taliban and the Afghan government. The first exchange isn't likely to produce much beyond a swapping of agendas.

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6 in 10 Americans Don't See Anything Wrong With Mass Government Surveillance

Brian Fung, National Journal — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 09:45:58 -0400

The first polling on the National Security Agency surveillance leak is out, and despite almost unanimous cries of outrage from the press and civil-liberties advocates, the rest of America seems decidedly "meh" on the matter.

Over half of us—56 percent, to be exact—think that serving phone companies with a secret court order to surrender customer phone records is an "acceptable" way to fight terrorism, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center. While 41 percent oppose the NSA surveillance program specifically, a much broader swath of the country is generally willing to sacrifice privacy for security. Sixty-two percent say they'd rather the government intrude on their privacy if it means making it easier to investigate terrorist threats.

This attitude might reflect, in part, a growing awareness that our control over privacy is slipping away as companies and services increasingly learn more about us and our behavior. What's another gigantic organization or two?

But the survey also reveals some fascinating demographic information. Out of the age groups surveyed, young people are both the least likely to be following the surveillance news closely and the most likely to say they highly value their privacy. Predictably, Democrats say they're supportive of the policy more often than Republicans do—and Republicans were far more supportive of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping back in 2006 when President Bush was in the White House, compared with today.

On the whole, only 27 percent of Americans are even paying close attention to the revelations. That's roughlythe same share of the country that in late May was tuned into the IRS targeting scandal and Congress's investigations into the Benghazi attack. Make of that what you will.

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What Gifts Do Foreign Leaders Give The United States?

Brian Fung, National Journal — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:27:00 -0400

Visiting a friend? It's only polite to bring a little something with you.

Heads of state aren't exempt from this unspoken rule, except that every present the White House accepts from other foreign dignitaries must be logged, tagged, and stored in official archives. (For the unfamiliar, there's an excellent "West Wing" episode about this.) Gift-giving is a routine part of diplomacy, but it also makes for interesting public data.

On Thursday, President Obama released a list of all the gifts he accepted in 2011 on behalf of the United States. For each gift, the PDF names the donor country, a description of the gift, an estimate of its value and a reason why Obama accepted it (typically something having to do with not wanting to make a scene by rejecting the present, even if they were just boring old "Witcher 2" DVDs). Faced with all this government data, there was only one thing to do with it: plug everything into a spreadsheet and see which foreign leaders outspent each other to impress the most powerful man in the world. The heat map above ranks countries according to the total value of their 2011 gifts to Obama, with darker colors representing more generous states.

Judging by how often they appear on the list (16 times), former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni at first seemed to have an easy lead on everyone else. But in fact, France was only the third-most generous country to the United States by the value of its gifts ($42,144.86). Coming ahead of it was Brazil ($43,802.46), which seemed really fixated on giving Obama rare soccer jerseys. But the award for Most Lavish Foreign Dignitary goes to the president of Gabon.

Yes, you read that right. Gabon, the tiny West African nation with a population the size of Idaho's and a 2011 per-capita GDP of $16,000. That year, Gabon's Ali Bongo Ondimba gave a single gift to Obama, and it alone was worth $52,695 -- 20 percent more than the value of all of Brazil's gifts combined, and 25 percent more than all of France's gifts. What exactly did Ondimba present to the White House that was worth more than 132 iPads put together? Here's the relevant entry in the report:

Feeling a little left out? Fear not -- you, too, can make like a visiting dignitary . For the full dataset, click here .

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Meet the leading contender to replace David Petraeus at the CIA

Brian Fung, The Atlantic — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 12:26:04 -0500

Even as the drama over David Petraeus continues, the CIA still has agents and operations to run all over the world. Somebody has to keep the lights on. That person is Michael Morell, the CIA's deputy director reportedly at the top of President Obama's shortlist to replace Petraeus permanently. In a statement Friday, Obama expressed "utmost confidence" in Morell in his capacity as acting director -- a signal many interpreted as an endorsement of Morell for Senate confirmation.

Obama's apparent pick is as natural as it is reassuring. This isn't Morell's first time running the agency; in 2011, he had a stint as acting director before Leon Panetta came on board and againahead of Petraeus' own tenure. Morell is a career agency analyst -- not a member of the operations branch that runs clandestine agents -- who cut his teeth on East Asia, which promises to be a major priority for the White House as it completes its pivot away from the Middle East in Obama's second term.

Morell's academic training is in economics; together with his background in intelligence analysis, installing him at the top of the CIA puts the United States in a good position for a future that some say should focus less on counter-terrorism and its attendant kinetic operations (read: the agency's drone program).