Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, told the House Intelligence Committee today that more than 50 terrorist plots worldwide have been prevented since the 9/11 attacks — “including at least 10 homeland- based threats” — through the classified surveillance programs the government uses to gather phone and Internet data, programs he said are legal and do not compromise the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.
According to the American Forces Press Service:
Testifying alongside Alexander, Deputy FBI Director Sean Joyce discussed two terrorist plots that he said the surveillance programs helped to prevent. In one, emails intercepted from a terrorist in Pakistan helped to stop a plot to bomb New York City’s subway system. Another involved a failed attempt by a known extremist in Yemen who conspired with a suspect in the United States to target the New York Stock Exchange. Both cases led to arrests and convictions, Joyce said.
“These programs are immensely valuable for protecting our nation and the security of our allies,” Alexander said, and added that they may have helped to prevent the 9/11 attacks themselves if the government had the legal authority, as granted by the Patriot Act, to use them at the time.
The disclosure of the NSA programs has generated a nationwide debate over what techniques the government can legally use to monitor phone and Internet data to prevent terrorism without violating the privacy and civil liberties of Americans. Alexander and other senior U.S officials emphasized that the gathering of phone numbers that already are being collected by service providers as well as the tracking of U.S-based Internet servers used by foreigners are legal and repeatedly have been approved by the courts and Congress.
“These programs are limited, focused and subject to rigorous oversight,” and their disciplined operation “protects the privacy and civil liberties of the American people,” Alexander said.
The details of the foiled terror plots that he plans to provide to Congress will remove any doubt about the usefulness of the surveillance in keeping the homeland safe, the NSA director told the House panel.
“In the 12 years since the attacks on Sept. 11, we have lived in relative safety and security as a nation,” he said. “That security is a direct result of the intelligence community’s quiet efforts to better connect the dots and learn from the mistakes that permitted those attacks.”
To prevent another damaging leak such as the breach caused by Snowden’s disclosures, Alexander told lawmakers, the NSA is looking into where security may have broken down and for ways to provide greater oversight for the roughly 1,000 or so system administrators at NSA who have access to top secret information.
The New York Times calling the tone of the hearings “nonadversarial,” says:
Both the top Republican and the top Democrat on the committee, Representatives Mike Rogers of Michigan and C. A. Dutch Ruppersburger of Maryland, offered a robust defense of the surveillance programs revealed by Mr. Snowden and expressed anger over the leaks, and all five witnesses were executive branch officials who supported the surveillance activities.
The Times continues:
In an apparent reference to Mr. Snowden, for example, Mr. Rogers criticized his actions as “selectively leaking incomplete information” that “paints an inaccurate picture and fosters distrust in our government.” He added, “It is at times like these where our enemies within become almost as damaging as our enemies on the outside,” but adds, “There was no way to independently verify the claims made by the officials during the hearing.”
In the meantime, there’s a flap brewing over exactly how “the highly protected and segregated computer systems that store the secret court warrants authorizing electronic surveillance inside the United States have been breached.”
The Daily Beast calls the Top Secret court order the Guardian published, “one of the most highly classified documents inside the U.S. government and says:
The warrants reside on two computer systems affiliated with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the National Security Division of the Department of Justice. Both systems are physically separated from other government-wide computer networks and employ sophisticated encryption technology, the officials said. Even lawmakers and staff lawyers on the House and Senate intelligence committees can only view the warrants in the presence of Justice Department attorneys, and are prohibited from taking notes on the documents.
“The only time that our attorneys would have gotten to read one was if Justice Department lawyers came over with it in a secure pouch and sat there with them when they read them,” said Pete Hoekstra, a former Republican chairman and ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “There was never one in the intelligence-committee spaces, never one left there without someone from the Justice Department. It would not have been left there overnight.”
The Daily Beast says that U.S. intelligence officials “have not yet concluded there is a mole inside the FISA Court or that the secure databases that store the court warrants have been compromised, only that both prospects were under active investigation.” However, it adds, “If the secret court has been breached, it would be one of the most significant intelligence failures in U.S. history, potentially giving America’s adversaries a road map to every suspected agent inside the United States currently being watched by the FBI, according to the officials.”
The Daily Beast updates its story with this:
On Tuesday, hours after this story was originally posted, General Keith Alexander, the NSA director, told reporters that Snowden had accessed some of the materials he later leaked, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant, from a special classified part of the NSA’s internal servers.
The FISA warrant that Snowden accessed “was on a web server at NSA in a special classified section that as he was getting his training he went to,” said Alexander. The highly classified warrant had been placed on an internal web forum intended to “help people understand how to operate NSA’s collection authorities, where you look for collection authorities.”
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