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Surveillance itself has become the
enemy
Washington Post
By Michael Hirsh
January 1, 2006
In any war, surveillance of the enemy is critical. Today, in the eyes of at
least some Americans, surveillance itself has become the enemy.
It was not always so. As any intelligence maven knows, some of the heroes of
World War II were eavesdroppers, not soldiers. They were quiet, wonkish men,
like those who monitored and deciphered Nazi communications about German battle
plans at Bletchley Park, an estate 50 miles northwest of London. Their
super-secret operation employed thousands of people who listened to 226 radio
frequencies for dot-and-dash messages and passed them to ingenious
code-breakers. The results were kept on 5-by-7 inch cards in shoe box-shaped
containers.
Who are our masters of surveillance today? Most are located at the National
Security Agency, the giant "Crypto City" complex located off Interstate 95
between Washington and Baltimore. The agency vacuums up 650 million intercepts
a day -- called signals intelligence, or sigint -- from satellites, ground
stations, aircraft, ships and submarines around the world. And it hunts for
patterns that might lend seemingly ordinary words significance in the war on
terrorism.
But the agency and its experts are not being hailed as heroes right now. The
NSA, so secretive that its letters are commonly said to stand for "No Such
Agency," has been uncomfortably in the limelight in recent weeks after the New
York Times revealed that as the result of a presidential order, the agency has
been monitoring thousands of Americans over the phone and by e-mail without
court authorization.
As the controversy over the legality and propriety of domestic surveillance
by the National Security Agency rages on, one question has not been adequately
addressed: Is the NSA's approach really the best way of tracking terrorists?
While there's no question that the NSA's covert move into domestic surveillance
raises serious legal and ethical issues, the equally important and less
examined question is whether -- more than four years after 9/11 -- the agency's
methods are suited to tracking the jihadists.
The difference between Bletchley Park and Crypto City has as much to do with
the very different nature of their tasks as with the way they are viewed. By
today's standards, the mission at Bletchley Park was well-defined. The targets
of the surveillance were clear: the German high command and intelligence
service. The signals collectors had a good fix on what communications to
monitor. The greatest challenge lay in breaking the extremely complex Enigma
code.
By contrast, the NSA conducts broad-based surveillance indiscriminately over
communications lines that few bad guys even use any longer. "Big Noddy," as
those in the know call the NSA's vast "Ear in the Sky," has capabilities that
dwarf the Bletchley Park World War II enterprise, but it isn't picking up much
because the smartest terrorist groups have long since stopped talking about
their plans over cell phones or land lines -- or to the extent they do, it's
probably to plant disinformation. Today the challenge isn't decoding an
intercepted message from a known enemy; instead it's figuring out what is and
isn't a message and who the enemy is.
The NSA was designed to monitor a relatively contained number of official
communications pipelines in nation-states -- for example, microwave
transmissions from Moscow to an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) base
in Siberia. But as Michael Hayden, then NSA director, told me in an interview
in late 2002: "We've gone from chasing the telecommunications structure of a
slow-moving, technologically inferior, resource-poor nation-state -- and we
could do that pretty well -- to chasing a communications structure in which an
al Qaeda member can go into a storefront in Istanbul and buy for $100 a
communications device that is absolutely cutting edge, and for which he has had
to make no investment for development."
The result is that the NSA is overwhelmed by millions of phone calls and
e-mail contacts that it simply can't digest. And it's not just a question of
finding the needle in the haystack; today's surveillance professionals aren't
sure what the needle looks like. The agency has adjusted, but it continues to
perform what some experts consider to be primitive, broad-based techniques,
like random keyword searches on the Web for Islamist tag lines. As a December
2002 report by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee noted, "Only a tiny
fraction of the daily intercepts are actually ever reviewed by humans, and much
of what is collected gets lost in the deluge of data."
Moreover, communications between terrorist groups today, says one
intelligence official, is either "air-gapped" -- in which a document or
computer disk is hand-delivered by messenger (as was seen in the letters
allegedly exchanged between al Qaeda chieftain Ayman Zawahiri and Iraqi
insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi) -- or it occurs through Web sites. Some
intelligence experts who are critical of NSA's efforts, like John Arquilla of
the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., a sometime Pentagon
consultant, say the real problem is that the agency is still pursuing a Cold
War-era strategy.
What the NSA really needs to do, say Arquilla and others, is to build a new
Bletchley Park. Just as Bletchley attracted Alan Turing, inventor of the modern
computer, the NSA needs to summon the Turings of our day -- mainly computer
hackers -- to snare al Qaeda and other terrorists at the only place they still
communicate electronically, on Web sites. An added benefit, Arquilla adds, is
that "if we went the route of a much greater emphasis of intelligence
collection on the Web and Net, we would learn a lot more and intrude less on
civil liberties."
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp., notes that most of the
major breakthroughs against al Qaeda-linked plots in recent years have shown
that the terrorists, wary of phone monitoring, are communicating through
couriers on the ground and coordinating plots on the Web. When Muhammad Naeem
Noor Khan, a protege of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was arrested in July 2004, his
laptop contained plans for simultaneous attacks on London and New York that
were to have been transmitted electronically. Today, adds Hoffman, the most
sophisticated terrorists have learned to evade the NSA altogether. "They keep
their messages in a draft file on a Web site, then give someone the password
and user name to get in. The NSA can't track that, because it's
stationary."
Pre-9/11 Acts Led To
Alerts
Most of the al Qaeda surveillance of five financial institutions that led to a
new terrorism alert Sunday was conducted before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and
authorities are not sure whether the casing of the buildings has continued,
numerous intelligence and law enforcement officials said yesterday.
More than half a dozen government officials interviewed yesterday, who
declined to be identified because classified information is involved, said that
most, if not all, of the information about the buildings seized by authorities
in a raid in Pakistan last week was about three years old, and possibly
older.
"There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new," said one senior
law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert.
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