Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

  It did not seem to matter to Bachmann that Abedin was married to Anthony Weiner, the former New York congressman and erstwhile candidate for mayor of New York who, in addition to disgracing himself through digital oversharing, was one of Israel’s staunchest supporters while he was Bachmann’s colleague in the House.

  Fear sustains the multibillion-dollar homeland security industry through both Republican and Democratic administrations. Michael Chertoff, the former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security who founded his own firm, the Chertoff Group, underlined the connection in early 2010, when he went on television news shows to discuss a failed airplane bombing plot and advocated for the installation of full-body scanners at U.S. airports to deter such plots—at the same time that his firm represented a company that made the scanners.

  The relationship among terrorist threats, fear, and cash was on full display at the Counter Terror Expo of 2012. At this gaudy two-day trade show for the war on terror, a hundred companies, large and small, paid for booths to display their wares in the Washington Convention Center, conveniently located close to their potential customers at the FBI, the Pentagon, or Homeland Security.

  Southwest Microwave was there, with the Intrepid MicroTrack II, a buried cable detection system—“terrain-following volumetric smart sensors that pinpoint intrusion attempts to within three meters.” Garrett was there, with the PD 6500i metal detector—“the walk-through of choice for security professionals worldwide.” Vertx was there, selling a rugged line of clothing “for the operational athlete,” including “OA Duty Wear Pants” and the “Combat Smock,” a kind of camouflage jacket complete with “deceptively large concealed chest pockets” and compartments that “fit an M-4 mag or phone.” And Flir was there, with the Griffin 460, bringing “chemical analysis out of the laboratory and into the field,” and offering “on-site analysis” of “chemicals of interest,” thus “giving users the actionable intelligence necessary to get the job done.”

  “The heightened sense of security absolutely helped our product lines grow,” said one company official at the booth for Ameristar Fence, a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based firm that sells sophisticated, high-security fencing. “Prior to 9/11, people were just going with chain-link fences.”

  Just to make certain that no one missed the connection between terrorist threats and product sales, the Counter Terror Expo featured a series of speeches and seminars on terrorism and homeland security. In addition to a keynote speech by Michael Leiter, the former director of the National Counter Terrorism Center, there was a series of panel discussions that brought together government officials, outside experts, and contractors. During one, a top official from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spoke in glowing terms about its first decade: “It’s fun to look back at ten years of TSA and see where we’ve come and our evolution. . . . We have 50,000 people who truly care about aviation security.” Considering that many listening were either with companies selling products to TSA or from companies that hoped to sell to TSA, this was probably the most sympathetic forum any TSA official could ever expect. “The next time you go through security at the airport, take a moment to thank the security screener for what they do, they don’t hear that often enough,” said the panel’s moderator.

  And in another panel discussion, this one on Iran and Hezbollah, in a side room just off the main Counter Terror Expo showroom floor, Steven Emerson held forth.

  By 2014, three years after Osama bin Laden’s death, there was still no sign that the business of fear was slowing down. One research and consulting firm predicted that the global market for homeland security and public safety would continue to undergo dramatic growth for years to come, and would reach $546 billion by 2022.

  9

  The War on Truth

  Of all the abuses America has suffered at the hands of the government in its endless war on terror, possibly the worst has been the war on truth. On the one hand, the executive branch has vastly expanded what it wants to know: something of a vast gathering of previously private truths. On the other hand, it has ruined lives to stop the public from gaining any insight into its dark arts, waging a war on truth. It all began at the NSA.

  It was early October 2001, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. Bill Binney was a senior official at the National Security Agency’s skunk works, an experimental lab at Fort Meade, Maryland, where the NSA’s best and brightest were trying to find ways to cope with the new digital age. He had been working at the NSA for more than thirty years and was just one month from retirement.

  Binney says that he was in his lab when Randy Jacobson, a contractor who worked with him on some of the lab’s most important projects, walked up and quietly revealed the secret new orders he had just received from the NSA’s top management. Jacobson was appalled by the orders and had to tell Binney about them, Binney recalled. (Jacobson did not respond to a request for comment.)

  Jacobson had been told to remove the Fourth Amendment protections from an experimental surveillance system, one of the most powerful spying programs the NSA had ever developed. The advanced system was still just a pilot project, but top NSA officials wanted to make it operational immediately—and use it to collect data on Americans. They had ordered Jacobson to strip away the carefully calibrated restrictions built into the system, which were designed to prevent it from illegally collecting information on U.S. citizens.

  Jacobson had come to Binney because the experimental surveillance system had been developed by Binney and his team, yet Binney had been cut out of the loop by his superiors about the decision to start using the system to target Americans. Jacobson told Binney that his surveillance software was being teamed up with phone lines from the AT&T network, allowing the surveillance system to spy on the phone calls of American citizens.

  “I was in the situation room of the lab, looking at papers, and Randy came in, and said, do you know what they are doing?” recalls Binney. “He said that AT&T is now feeding U.S. data into the system, and they are taking the protections for Americans off.”

  That is how America’s post-9/11 Big Brother got its start.

  This is the story of the people who tried to stop the NSA’s domestic spying program when it first began, in the face of money, power, and greed. It is also the story of how government secrecy—and a crackdown on whistleblowers—has enabled the worst excesses of the post-9/11 era to go unchecked, from torture to data mining on a massive scale. Secrecy has enabled a new class of national security entrepreneurs and wild freebooters. Secrecy breeds corruption.

  Dennis Montgomery, Mike Asimos, and others—like Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince—would never have gotten as far as they did without the protection of the government’s high walls of classification. James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen could never have so easily reverse-engineered SERE so the CIA could torture prisoners if the CIA did not keep it all secret. And Michael Hayden, the director of the NSA at the time of 9/11, would never have dared to launch the agency’s warrantless wiretapping program if he didn’t think the White House would do everything in its power to shield the NSA from the law and crush any whistleblowers who tried to get in the way. That same secrecy has surrounded NSA’s operations ever since, even as the NSA has continued to push for greater access to the domestic communications of American citizens.

  Secrecy continues to shield the NSA from uncomfortable questions about the growing role of the agency and its contractors in data mining and the burgeoning field of cybersecurity. The only way the American public ever learns what the NSA is doing to them is from whistleblowers, including, most recently, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked documents about the rise of the NSA’s massive data-mining operations during the Obama administration. To keep the war on terror going, the government has tried to make sure that whistleblowers are isolated and ostracized.

  People like Diane Roark. She was perhaps the most courageous whistleblower of the post-9/11 era, and yet her story has never been fully to
ld. She fought a lonely battle against the most powerful forces unleashed in Washington in the global war on terror. She has never received the recognition she deserves.

  Roark’s story also explains why, years later, Snowden felt that he had to go outside the system to let the American people know just how much the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs had grown since the early days after 9/11, when the Bush administration first launched the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping operation. Roark tried to work within the system, tried to go through the right channels. She was persecuted as a result.

  Roark’s story offers the most in-depth and personal look at the rise of the NSA’s domestic spying program ever provided, and explains how America allowed its most powerful foreign intelligence service to turn its tools on the United States. It is a lesson to remember as the government cracks down on people like Edward Snowden at the same time that the NSA continues to expand its spying on the digital lives of American citizens.

  When Randy Jacobson came to warn Bill Binney about the new orders he had just received, directing him to alter the surveillance system that Binney had designed so that it could be used to target Americans, Binney knew exactly how significant—and how dangerous—those orders really were. When he built the system, Binney had gone out of his way to create strong protections to prevent its use on Americans. He knew that he had created something so powerful that, if it were ever turned on the United States, it could become the cornerstone of an American Big Brother. So he had made certain that the system would automatically block data about U.S. citizens in order to comply with the laws against domestic spying that governed the NSA’s intelligence operations.

  Before the 9/11 attacks, in fact, the NSA’s own lawyers had told Binney that they were afraid of his new system. They told him that they believed it was too dangerous to deploy, because it was too powerful. The lawyers were concerned because the speed and efficiency with which the new system collected and analyzed digital information meant that it was likely to illegally collect vast amounts of American data, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other laws and regulations that limited NSA to spying on foreigners.

  Binney had argued with the lawyers, telling them that he had already built in strong protections to make certain that any data collected on Americans would remain encrypted and blocked by the software. Data on American citizens could never be viewed by NSA analysts using the system. But the lawyers had been adamant that Binney’s program was too risky and would put the NSA in legal jeopardy. To the NSA lawyers, Binney was like a mad scientist who had developed a monster that had to be kept chained in the basement. As a result, Binney’s system had never been allowed beyond the pilot project stage.

  But now, in the wake of 9/11, it was a different story. Now the NSA not only wanted to deploy the system, but the agency wanted to unleash Binney’s monster on the American public. The NSA wanted to do exactly what its lawyers had previously told Binney they feared most. Bill Binney’s lab experiment was being turned into a coldly efficient weapon to spy on American citizens.

  Jacobson told Binney that the NSA’s new domestic spying operation was being set up in a big office space just down the hall from Binney’s skunk works, on the third floor of Building 2B at the NSA headquarters complex. New AT&T lines were already being installed in the room.

  After Jacobson told him about his secret orders and then quietly walked away, Binney immediately understood why top NSA officials had kept him in the dark. He had been making waves inside the NSA for years and had developed a reputation for being a loose cannon in an agency filled with quiet conformists. Binney was outgoing, talkative and curious, a man who found it easy to laugh and who was always eager to share what he knew with others inside the agency. He believed the agency had become too hidebound and was not keeping up with the revolution under way in information technology, and so he had gravitated to the skunk works in order to try to shake things up. He was constantly questioning the way things were done at the NSA.

  That made Bill Binney stick out like a sore thumb in an agency of introverts. A stunning 80 percent of NSA personnel have been identified as ISTJ (Introverted Sensing Thinking Judging) types on the Myers-Briggs personality profile test. That meant that the NSA was filled with quiet people who valued tradition, order, and loyalty; who were organized and methodical; who believed in procedures and plans and respected rules. They were people who believed in going by the book. The joke was that an extrovert at the NSA was someone who looked down at your shoes while talking, instead of at his own.

  The NSA did not use the Myers-Briggs test to determine whom it would hire. But the agency’s screening process, its hunt for math and computer experts willing to work in a secret, highly compartmentalized organization where they would perform abstract, analytical functions that they could not discuss with anyone else, led to a high degree of uniformity. Many of the NSA’s ISTJs were eclectic geeks just this side of Rain Man. One was known to park his car in exactly the same spot in the agency parking lot every day—no matter whether the lot was empty—and then walk precisely the same steps from that parking spot to his office. Another would buy secondhand pants, wear them every day to work for two weeks, and then throw them out and buy another pair, so that he never had to do laundry.

  In addition to this disarming weirdness, there was a dark side to the predominance of this singular personality type within the agency. The introverts at the NSA never questioned authority. They kept to themselves and remained silent about the agency’s secrets, for good or ill. Many NSA employees were married to other NSA employees, and often their children came to work there as well, reinforcing the agency’s insular nature, enhanced by its geographic isolation at Fort Meade in suburban Maryland, far from the rest of official Washington.

  This quietly obedient workforce, cramped into a zone of absolute secrecy, sometimes had the feel of a cult that was deeply suspicious of outside influences. That made the NSA ripe for corruption and abuse, an organization that wasted billions, refused to admit mistakes, and was a tempting target for leaders eager to wield its awesome technological power however they saw fit.

  Bill Binney was one of the NSA’s 20 percent who were not ISTJs yet had still found a home in its secret world. He grew up in central Pennsylvania, majored in math at Penn State, and, after joining the army in 1965, was assigned to the U.S. Army Security Agency, where he learned communications traffic analysis. He soon found himself at a U.S. base in Turkey, analyzing Soviet-bloc communications in the midst of the Cold War. In 1967, he was assigned by the army to NSA headquarters, and, after leaving the service in 1969, returned to the NSA as a civilian in 1970. He stayed for the rest of his career, and by the late 1990s, had risen through the ranks to become the agency’s technical director for world geopolitical and military analysis, making him one of the top technical geeks in the agency’s main operations directorate. He was also assigned to a special NSA panel that managed the agency’s technical relationships with foreign intelligence services around the world.

  But he had been frustrated throughout his career with the NSA’s bureaucratic ways. For decades, the agency’s flaws had been masked by the fact that the NSA’s main adversary—the Soviet Union—was a hulking, slow-moving target that made the NSA look nimble by comparison. But after the end of the Cold War, the NSA began to drift, in search of new missions just as the Internet was triggering a digital revolution.

  Binney had taken over the agency’s skunk works, officially named the Sigint Automation Research Center, or SARC, in order to force-feed change into the agency’s bloated system. At the SARC in the 1990s, he realized that the biggest problem for the NSA was that it still did not know what to do about the Internet and the surging growth of digital communications online. In the early 1990s, at the dawn of the Internet age, the NSA had been largely dismissive of the web. The agency had traditionally focused on cracking codes and secretly breaking into the secure communications of foreign governments and armies, and NSA
officials saw little value in monitoring the new public websites that were starting to crop up all over the world. If the information wasn’t secret, it couldn’t be of much interest.

  Binney, however, realized that the NSA was facing a paradigm shift but didn’t know it yet. There was an ocean of information being created on the Internet, and the new challenge for the agency was not how to break in and collect a narrow band of data that revealed the Soviet order of battle, but how to sift through and analyze massive amounts of openly available information flooding through the world’s computers.

  The NSA’s fetish for secrecy made things worse. The data that the agency did collect was streaming into hundreds of different databases scattered throughout the agency, all compartmented and closed off from each other. There were at least forty major databases used frequently by analysts, each one tied directly to a specific and highly secretive collection program somewhere in the world. If, for instance, the NSA managed to clandestinely access high-frequency Russian military radio traffic, the data would be fed into its own database, separate from data acquired through other collection programs. There were at least fourteen different databases for phone data alone.

  Scouring the databases for information was cumbersome and time-consuming. One of the NSA’s largest data repositories was known as Pinwale, and its search function was called Dictionary Search. Pinwale was so massive and poorly organized, and Dictionary Search so rudimentary, that it could take hours for the system to provide answers to many basic questions.