Thursday, August 1, 2013

Internet Spying by NSA Program XKeyscore

    Glenn Greenwald
     
    One presentation claims the XKeyscore program covers 'nearly everything a typical user does on the internet'
     
    A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
    The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.
    The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian's earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and FISA surveillance court oversight.
    The files shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.
    "I, sitting at my desk," said Snowden, could "wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email".
    US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden's assertion: "He's lying. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do."
    But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.
    XKeyscore, the documents boast, is the NSA's "widest reaching" system developing intelligence from computer networks – what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). One presentation claims the program covers "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet", including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata.
    Analysts can also use XKeyscore and other NSA systems to obtain ongoing "real-time" interception of an individual's internet activity.
    Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized FISA Warrant only if the target of their surveillance is a 'US person', though no such warrant is required for intercepting the communications of Americans with foreign targets. But XKeyscore provides the technological capability, if not the legal authority, to target even US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst.
    One training slide illustrates the digital activity constantly being collected by XKeyscore and the analyst's ability to query the databases at any time.
     
    The purpose of XKeyscore is to allow analysts to search the meta datas well as the content of emails and other internet activity, such as browser history, even when there is no known email account (a "selector" in NSA parlance) associated with the individual being targeted.
    Analysts can also search by name, telephone number, IP address, keywords, the language in which the internet activity was conducted or the type of browser used.
    One document notes that this is because "strong selection [search by email address] itself gives us only a very limited capability" because "a large amount of time spent on the web is performing actions that are anonymous."
    The NSA documents assert that by 2008, 300 terrorists had been captured using intelligence from XKeyscore.
    Analysts are warned that searching the full database for content will yield too many results to sift through. Instead they are advised to use the meta data also stored in the databases to narrow down what to review.
    A slide entitled "plug-ins" in a December 2012 document describes the various fields of information that can be searched. It includes "every email address seen in a session by both username and domain", "every phone number seen in a session (eg address book entries or signature block)" and user activity – "the webmail and chat activity to include username, buddylist, machine specific cookies etc".
    Email Monitoring
    In a second Guardian interview in June, Snowden elaborated on his statement about being able to read any individual's email if he had their email address. He said the claim was based in part on the email search capabilities of XKeyscore, which Snowden says he was authorized to use while working as a Booz Allen contractor for the NSA.
    One top-secret document describes how the program "searches within bodies of emails, webpages and documents", including the "To, From, CC, BCC lines" and the 'Contact Us' pages on websites".
    To search for emails, an analyst using XKS enters the individual's email address into a simple online search form, along with the "justification" for the search and the time period for which the emails are sought.
    The analyst then selects which of those returned emails they want to read by opening them in NSA reading software.
    The system is similar to the way in which NSA analysts generally can intercept the communications of anyone they select, including, as one NSA document put it, "communications that transit the United States and communications that terminate in the United States".
    One document, a top secret 2010 guide describing the training received by NSA analysts for general surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, explains that analysts can begin surveillance on anyone by clicking a few simple pull-down menus designed to provide both legal and targeting justifications. Once options on the pull-down menus are selected, their target is marked for electronic surveillance and the analyst is able to review the content of their communications:
     
    Chats, browsing history and other internet activity
    Beyond emails, the XKeyscore system allows analysts to monitor a virtually unlimited array of other internet activities, including those within social media.
    An NSA tool called DNI Presenter, used to read the content of stored emails, also enables an analyst using XKeyscore to read the content of Facebook chats or private messages.
    An analyst can monitor such Facebook chats by entering the Facebook user name and a date range into a simple search screen.
     
    Analysts can search for internet browsing activities using a wide range of information, including search terms entered by the user or the websites viewed.
     
    As one slide indicates, the ability to search HTTP activity by keyword permits the analyst access to what the NSA calls "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet".
     
    The XKeyscore program also allows an analyst to learn the IP addresses of every person who visits any website the analyst specifies.
     
    The quantity of communications accessible through programs such as XKeyscore is staggeringly large. One NSA report from 2007 estimated that there were 850 billion "call events" collected and stored in the NSA databases, and close to 150 billion internet records. Each day, the document says, 1-2 billion records were added.
    William Binney, a former NSA mathematician, said last year that the agency had "assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens", an estimate, he said, that "only was involving phone calls and emails". 
    A 2010 Washington Post article reported that "every day, collection systems at the [NSA] intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other type of communications."
    The XKeyscore system is continuously collecting so much internet data that it can be stored only for short periods of time. Content remains on the system for only three to five days, while metadata is stored for 30 days. One document explains: "At some sites, the amount of data we receive per day (20+ terabytes) can only be stored for as little as 24 hours."To solve this problem, the NSA has created a multi-tiered system that allows analysts to store "interesting" content in other databases, such as one named Pinwale which can store material for up to five years. 
    It is the databases of XKeyscore, one document shows, that now contain the greatest amount of communications data collected by the NSA.
     
    In 2012, there were at least 41 billion total records collected and stored in XKeyscore for a single 30-day period.
     
    Legal v technical restrictions
    While the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 requires an individualized warrant for the targeting of US persons, NSA analysts are permitted to intercept the communications of such individuals without a warrant if they are in contact with one of the NSA's foreign targets.
    The ACLU's deputy legal director, Jameel Jaffer, told the Guardian last month that national security officials expressly said that a primary purpose of the new law was to enable them to collect large amounts of Americans' communications without individualized warrants."The government doesn't need to 'target' Americans in order to collect huge volumes of their communications," said Jaffer. "The government inevitably sweeps up the communications of many Americans" when targeting foreign nationals for surveillance.
    An example is provided by one XKeyscore document showing an NSA target in Tehran communicating with people in Frankfurt, Amsterdam and New York.
     
    In recent years, the NSA has attempted to segregate exclusively domestic US communications in separate databases. But even NSA documents acknowledge that such efforts are imperfect, as even purely domestic communications can travel on foreign systems, and NSA tools are sometimes unable to identify the national origins of communications.
    Moreover, all communications between Americans and someone on foreign soil are included in the same databases as foreign-to-foreign communications, making them readily searchable without warrants.
    Some searches conducted by NSA analysts are periodically reviewed by their supervisors within the NSA. "It's very rare to be questioned on our searches," Snowden told the Guardian in June, "and even when we are, it's usually along the lines of: 'let's bulk up the justification'."
    In a letter this week to Senator Ron Wyden, director of national intelligence James Clapper acknowledged that NSA analysts have exceeded even legal limits as interpreted by the NSA in domestic surveillance.
    Acknowledging what he called "a number of compliance problems", Clapper attributed them to "human error" or "highly sophisticated technology issues" rather than "bad faith".
    However, Sen. Wyden said on the Senate floor on Tuesday: "These violations are more serious than those stated by the intelligence community, and are troubling."
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Senators Question the NSA

Senate Panel Presses N.S.A. on Phone Logs

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WASHINGTON — Senators of both parties on Wednesday sharply challenged the National Security Agency’s collection of records of all domestic phone calls, even as the latest leaked N.S.A. document provided new details on the way the agency monitors Web browsing around the world.
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Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

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At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, the chairman, Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, accused Obama administration officials of overstating the success of the domestic call log program. He said he had been shown a classified list of “terrorist events” detected through surveillance, and it did not show that “dozens or even several terrorist plots” had been thwarted by the domestic program.
“If this program is not effective it has to end. So far, I’m not convinced by what I’ve seen,” Mr. Leahy said, citing the “massive privacy implications” of keeping records of every American’s domestic calls.
At the start of the hearing, the Obama administration released previously classified documents outlining the rules for how the domestic phone records may be accessed and used by intelligence analysts. And as senators debated the program, The Guardian published on its Web site a still-classified 32-page presentation, apparently downloaded by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, that describes a separate surveillance activity by the agency.
Called the XKeyscore program, it apparently gives N.S.A. analysts access to virtually any Internet browsing activity around the world, data that is being vacuumed up from 150 foreign sites.
Together, the new disclosures provided additional details on the scope of the United States government’s secret surveillance programs, which have been dragged into public view and public debate by leaks from Mr. Snowden, who remains stranded in a Moscow airport.
The hearing came a week after the House voted narrowly to defeat an amendment to shut down the N.S.A.’s domestic phone record tracking program. The 217-to-205 vote was far closer than expected, and it — along with shifting poll numbers — suggested that momentum against the domestic program was building. In recent days even some of the most outspoken supporters of the program have said they are open to adjusting it.
The Obama administration has been trying to build public support for its surveillance programs, which trace back to the Bush administration, by arguing that they are subject to strict safeguards and court oversight and that they have helped thwart as many as 54 terrorist events. That figure, Mr. Leahy emphasized, relies upon conflating another program that allows surveillance targeted at noncitizens abroad, which has apparently been quite valuable, with the domestic one.
Still, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she supported overhauling the program but keeping it in place because it generates information that might prevent attacks.
John C. Inglis, the deputy director of the N.S.A., said there had been 13 investigations in which the domestic call tracking program made a “contribution.” He cited two discoveries: that several men in San Diego were sending money to a terrorist group in Somalia, and that a suspect who was already under scrutiny in a subway bomb plot was using a different phone.
Robert S. Litt, the top lawyer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, testified that the Obama administration was also “open to re-evaluating this program” to create greater public confidence that it protects privacy while “preserving the essence of the program.” Administration officials have emphasized that the program collects only so-called metadata, and not the contents of phone calls.
Still, the top Republican on the committee, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, asked skeptical questions about the legal basis for the program while criticizing the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, for making inaccurate statements to Congress about it in March. Mr. Clapper has sinceapologized.
“Nothing can excuse this kind of behavior from a senior administration official of any administration, especially on matters of such grave importance,” Mr. Grassley said.
A series of slides describing XKeyscore, dated 2008, make it clear that the security agency system is collecting a huge amount of data on Internet activity around the globe, from chats on social networks to browsing of Web sites and searches on Google Maps. The volume of data is so vast that most of it is stored for only three days, although metadata — information showing logins and server activity, but not content — is stored for a month. Several of the pages were redacted by The Guardian.
Some of the servers the agency uses are run by foreign intelligence services of friendly nations, including Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, but other servers may be on the soil of countries unaware the agency is mining Internet “pipes” on their soil. Some of the harvesting of data takes place on the coasts of the United States, and along the Mexican border. Most sites are in Europe, the Middle East, and along the borders of India, Pakistan, and China.
The intelligence analysts search for terrorist cells by looking at “anomalous events” — someone searching in German from Pakistani sites, or an Iranian sending an encrypted Microsoft Word file. But one slide says the system can be used to identify anyone “searching the Web for suspicious stuff.”

Documents Declassified N.S.A. Documents on Data Collection

Read and search three documents related to the National Security Agency’s collection of phone records.

Related in Opinion

Editorial: More Fog From the Spy Agencies (August 1, 2013)
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The presentation says the system enables analysts to identify and pursue leads even if they do not yet know the name, or the e-mail address, of a suspect. “A large amount of time spent on the Web is performing actions that are anonymous,” it explains.
One example of how analysts might use the system is to search for whenever someone has started up a “virtual private network” in a particular country of interest; the networks are pipelines that add greater security to online communications. N.S.A. analysts are able to use the system to extract the activity retrospectively from “raw unselected bulk traffic,” the documents say, and then decrypt it to “discover the users.”
The agency said its surveillance of the Internet was part of its “lawful foreign signals intelligence collection” and not “arbitrary and unconstrained.” The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Mike Rogers, and the ranking Democrat, C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger, said, “The program does not target American citizens.”
The XKeyscore presentation claimed the program had generated intelligence that resulted in the capture of more than 300 terrorists. By contrast, the documents released by the government about the domestic phone log program were more abstract.
They included briefing papers to Congress from2009 and 2011 about the “very large scale” logging of Americans’ calling records — along with a related program that logged Americans’ e-mails, and that was shut down later in 2011 — portraying the programs as providing a vital and important capability.
But Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who has been a leading critic of the bulk collection programs, said the program had been shut down because officials were unable “to provide evidence to support the claims” of operational value. Mr. Wyden has also questioned the utility of the phone log program.
The new documents also included an April “primary order” by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that supported orders requiring phone companies to turn over all customer records. It said the government may access the records only when there are “facts giving rise to a reasonable, articulable suspicion” that the number to be searched is associated with terrorism.
However, it said that the results of each inquiry are then placed in a “corporate store” that analysts may search without any such limits. 
Intelligence officials have separately said that search results include not just a target’s phone records, but also exponentially larger sets of the records of people in as many as three concentric circles around the target.

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Delete the NSA

Google Engineer Wins NSA Award, Then Says NSA Should Be Abolished

He would know.
Photo Credit: Africa Rising/Shutterstock.com
July 26, 2013  |  
 
 
 
 

Last week, Dr. Joseph Bonneau learned that he had won the NSA’s first annualScience of Security (SoS) Competition. The competition, which aims to honor the best “scientific papers about national security” as a way to strengthen NSA collaboration with researchers in academia, honored Bonneau for his paper on the nature of passwords.
And how did Bonneau respond to being honored by the NSA? By expressing, in an honest and bittersweet  blog post, his revulsion at what the NSA has become:
On a personal note, I’d be remiss not to mention my conflicted feelings about winning the award given what we know about the NSA’s widespread collection of private communications and what remains unknown about oversight over the agency’s operations. Like many in the community of cryptographers and security engineers, I’m sad that we haven’t better informed the public about the inherent dangers and questionable utility of mass surveillance. And like many American citizens I’m ashamed we’ve let our politicians sneak the country down this path.
In accepting the award I don’t condone the NSA’s surveillance.Simply put, I don’t think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form.
In an  interview with Andy Cush at Animal, Bonneau went even farther in his critiques of the NSA:
I’d rather have it abolished than persist in its current form. I think there’s a question about whether it’s possible to reform the NSA into something that’s more reasonable…But my feeling based on what I’ve read is that I don’t want to live in a country with an organization like the NSA is right now.
When Bonneau learned that he has won the award from the NSA, he considered turning it down. However, he ultimately decided upon accepting as a way to potentially bridge academic gaps with the NSA, as a means of opening up at least one avenue into the organization that has been mostly closed.
That said, the winner of the NSA award wants, like many privacy rights activists and citizens concerned with the government’s Fourth Amendment violations, for the NSA to be reformed by a political process (like the one which narrowly failed in the House yesterday).
Either that, or have it abolished altogether.
 

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