Dark Mirror

by Barton Gellman

  unique hardware identifiers: There are two such identifiers. The International Mobile Subscriber Identity, or IMSI, belongs to the SIM card for each customer account. The International Mobile Station Equipment Identity, or IMEI, is unique to the mobile telephone itself. It does not change when a customer inserts a new SIM card.

  “comprehensive communications routing information”: Judge Roger Vinson, “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Secondary Order,” April 25, 2013, on file with author. The Guardian posted the order online at https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/709012/verizon.pdf.

  “relevant to” an authorized investigation: Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 was enacted into public law as 50 U.S.C. § 1861, “Access to certain business records for foreign intelligence and international terrorism investigations,” at www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861.

  The computational methods: A general account of the methods employed were published in an unclassified NSA report two weeks before the Verizon story broke. See Paul Burkhardt and Chris Waring, “An NSA Big Graph Experiment,” U.S. National Security Agency Research Directorate—R6, Technical Report NSA-RD-2013-056002v1, May 20, 2013, archived at https://archive.is/3ra8T.

  a principal drafter of the Patriot Act: See Ryan J. Reilly, “Jim Sensenbrenner, Patriot Act Author, Slams ’Un-American’ NSA Verizon Phone Records Grab,” Huffington Post, June 6, 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/jim-sensenbrenner-nsa_n_3397440.html. See also the letter from Sensenbrenner to Attorney General Eric Holder, September 6, 2013, http://sensenbrenner.house.gov/uploadedfiles/sensenbrenner_letter_to_attorney_general_eric_holder.pdf [inactive]. Two high-ranking intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have told me that Sensenbrenner refused to take part in classified briefings that would have revealed the breadth of telephone record collection. Any member of Congress could, in theory, ask to read the legal documents inside a vault where they could take no notes. Very few employed a staff member with sufficient clearance to read and provide analysis of the material.

  The court’s order: The Snowden archive provided only a “secondary order” in which Judge Vinson renewed legal authority that the court had granted previously. Snowden did not have or did not supply the original opinion. Later, under pressure of the public disclosures, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a redacted version of the original legal reasoning. See “DNI Clapper Declassifies and Releases Telephone Metadata Documents,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence, July 31, 2013, archived at https://archive.is/9n0SK.

  “I’m not generally given”: I typed live notes during this conversation on June 6, 2013.

  “If the harm that you’re asserting”: Ibid. I take better notes on what other people say than what I do. I reconstructed my own comments shortly after we hung up.

  We moved the PRISM story: Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, “U.S., British Intelligence Mining Data from Nine U.S. Internet Companies in Broad Secret Program,” Washington Post, June 6, 2013, http://wapo.st/1LcAw6p, archived at https://archive.is/cYyFe. Greenwald’s version, which followed, disclosed nothing that the Post held back. Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, “NSA Prism Program Taps In to User Data of Apple, Google and Others,” Guardian, June 6, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data.

  “For Internet content selectors”: Working draft of NSA Inspector General’s Report ST-09-0002, history of STELLARWIND surveillance, March 24, 2009, p. 20, on file with author.

  “The actual architecture is very”: Chris Inglis, interview with author, June 14, 2013.

  a twelve-minute video: “NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I Don’t Want to Live in a Society That Does These Sort of Things’—Video,” Guardian, June 9, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video.

  “I’m scrolling through my Twitter feed”: C. Danielle Massarini, interview with author, August 12, 2016.

  CHAPTER FIVE: BACKLASH

  “We’re not going to open”: Dennis Blair to author by telephone, July 10, 2013.

  an angular six foot two: Or so his deputy spokesman, Kenneth McGraw, told me in November 2011. Some press accounts describe him as up to six foot four.

  two miles of free fall: McRaven was taking part that day in an exercise to maintain proficiency in the technique known as the HALO jump, which stands for “high-altitude, low opening.” The high start and last-minute pull of the ripcord are intended to maximize stealth.

  “split me like a nutcracker”: McRaven had not, as far as I knew, spoken publicly of the accident before. I profiled him as a runner-up for Person of the Year in 2011. See Barton Gellman, “William McRaven: The Admiral,” Time, December 14, 2011, archived at https://archive.is/6q7bq.

  “the tension between”: Michael Isikoff, then of NBC News, moderated a panel that featured NSA general counsel Raj De and ACLU executive director Anthony Romero. The other panelists were Neil MacBride, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Jeh Johnson, the former Pentagon general counsel, and former representative Jane Harman (D-CA), who now ran the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Video of the panel is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJiTjCAMjLY.

  “We didn’t have another 9/11”: Admiral William McRaven to author, July 18, 2013. I took notes immediately after he walked off.

  “was the voice of Walter Cronkite”: McRaven had live video links during the bin Laden raid to his forward troops, the CIA, and the White House Situation Room. For the Cronkite comparison: Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, interview with author, December 7, 2011. Another participant, who did not want to be named, agreed with Leiter and added that others on the video briefing “were shitting their pants. I know I was.”

  majored in journalism: McRaven earned his journalism degree in the class of 1977 at the University of Texas, where he also trained as a Navy reserve officer. Gellman, Time, December 14, 2011.

  a treatise on special warfare: McRaven’s master’s thesis ran to 612 pages and is said to have helped change the U.S. military doctrine of special warfare. William H. McRaven, “The Theory of Special Operations,” Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, June 17, 1993, on file with author and archived at https://archive.is/jNhf.

  “This will go down in history”: William McRaven, interview with author, December 5, 2011.

  self-government and self-defense: I will have more to say about the dilemmas of news reporting on national security in chapter 7.

  my thesis on wartime: Barton Gellman, “Secrecy, Security and the ‘Right to Know’: Some Grounds and Limits of Open Government” (M.Litt. thesis in Politics, University of Oxford, 1988).

  “but I would much rather”: Author to William McRaven, email, January 10, 2017.

  “I’m happy to chat with you”: William McRaven to author, email, January 10, 2017.

  John Wayne coffee mug: The description of McRaven’s office decor is from a photograph published with Brian D. Sweany, “The Four-Star Chancellor,” Texas Monthly, October 2015, at www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/the-four-star-chancellor/.

  “what precipitated my outburst”: William McRaven, telephone interview with author, January 11, 2017.

  kept in the dark: Only the chief judge of the FISA Court and the “Big Eight” in Congress—the Speaker of the House, House minority leader, majority and minority leaders in the Senate, and the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence committees—were privy to the warrantless surveillance in the early days. See Gellman, Angler, chapters 11 and 12.

  “I don’t like it much”: Conference call with Dennis Blair and John Negroponte, July 10, 2013. I typed notes audibly throughout, and Blair identified a few specific points, not these, that he wanted to keep “on background” or off the record.

  “It’s safe to say”: For video of the panel discussion with Blair and Negroponte, see
“Mission Accomplished? Has the Intelligence Community Connected All the Dots?,” Aspen Security Forum, July 18, 2013, https://youtu.be/QdxWWSG5f8Y.

  “One of the reasons”: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted for the April 2013 bombing. His older brother, Tamerlan, died after Dzhokhar ran him over while trying to escape police.

  “talking to the terrorists”: Senator Lindsey Graham, Fox & Friends, June 6, 2013. The video is at https://youtu.be/UjTcs5T1jpQ.

  “It seems like to me”: The former president used this benign-sounding formula after the New York Times disclosed the warrantless surveillance program. “President Bush Delivers Remarks on Terrorism,” Louisville, KY, January 11, 2006, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/01/20060111-7.html.

  Trillions of calls: The government has not released a number or estimate, and the Snowden archive does not provide one. Several officials, including Dennis Blair during the Aspen panel, said the number is in the trillions.

  a base of two: Beginning on the second day, the penny count is calculated as two to the first power, then two squared, two cubed, and so on. On the twenty-eighth day, the pot reaches 227 cents (two to the twenty-seventh power) plus the first day’s penny, or $1,342,177.29.

  a tenfold increase: This is a simplified account for illustration. For any large number of telephone accounts, some of my contacts, or contacts of contacts, will overlap with someone else’s. The number of unique contacts in the chain will increase at a somewhat slower rate than my simplified description. The general point on exponential growth remains valid.

  John C. Inglis: Inglis, who goes by Chris, announced his retirement in early 2014. He gave a valedictory interview to National Public Radio on January 10, 2014, archived at https://archive.is/5j5Yg.

  “go out two or three hops”: Testimony of John C. Inglis, “The Administration’s Use of FISA Authorities,” House Committee on the Judiciary, July 17, 2013, https://fas.org/irp/congress/2013_hr/fisa.pdf.

  data scientists estimated: Among the early works in this field was Michael Gurevitch, whose 1991 doctoral dissertation, “The Social Structure of Acquaintanceship Networks,” may be found at https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11312.

  Six Degrees of Separation: The play, which opened in previews on October 30, 1990, won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Play of 1990. John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation: A Play (New York: Random House, 1990), ISBN 0-679-40161-X. The original playbill is archived at www.playbill.com/show/detail/11250/six-degrees-of-separation.

  “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”: The game led to television appearances alongside Bacon, and then a book. See Craig Fass, Brian Turtle, and Mike Ginelli, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (New York: Plume, 1996).

  inspired a website: The Oracle of Bacon, http://oracleofbacon.org.

  Two hops, through Rourke: The Oracle of Bacon site uses the term “Bacon Number” in place of “hop.” It assigns Johansson, for example, a Bacon Number of 2.

  three links in the chain: See, for example, Stanley Milgram, “The Small World Problem,” Psychology Today 1, no. 1 (1967).

  “Under three hundred”: A panel appointed by President Obama later disclosed that the number was 288. See President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, Liberty and Security in a Changing World, December 12, 2013, p. 102, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2013-12-12_rg_final_report.pdf.

  I worked through the arithmetic: For purposes of simplicity, I used back-of-the-napkin assumptions that probably overstated the result. Although each caller has one hundred contacts in this example, there may be some overlap in their contact lists. The aggregate number of unique contacts in the records of any ten callers, that is, may be fewer than a thousand. On the second and third hops, which produce much larger numbers, such overlap is statistically likelier. With appropriate adjustments, the calculation was nonetheless roughly correct.

  Multiply by one hundred: Five months later, U.S. district judge Richard Leon used the same working estimate, which he described as conservative, when he found the metadata collection to be unconstitutional. Klayman v. Obama, Civil Action 13-0851, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, December 16, 2013, at https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/901810/klaymanvobama215.pdf.

  had he known back then: Blair did not join in pre-election letters in 2015 and 2016 that called Donald Trump unfit to be commander in chief. His only public criticism came in response to reports that Trump was thinking of abolishing his old job. “Elimination of the DNI position would be a major setback for the kind of integrated intelligence that the U.S. will need in the future,” he said. Matthew Cole and Jenna McLaughlin, “Donald Trump Hopes to Abolish Intelligence Chief Position, Reverse CIA Reforms,” Intercept, November 18, 2016, archived at https://archive.is/VFnV3.

  deputy chief technology officer of the United States: Leadership staff, Office of Science and Technology Policy, archived at https://archive.is/ZLEol. See also https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/05/11/white-house-names-dr-ed-felten-deputy-us-chief-technology-officer.

  “Individual pieces of data”: Declaration of Professor Edward W. Felten, August 26, 2013, in ACLU v. Clapper, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, archived at https://archive.is/w3n04.

  A presidential review group: Appointed by President Obama, the group concluded, “Our review suggests that the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of section 215 telephony meta-data was not essential to preventing attacks and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional section 215 orders.” See President’s Review Group, Liberty and Security in a Changing World, p. 104.

  criticized some of my stories: See, for example, Stewart Baker, “The Washington Post’s Doubtful Privacy Statistics,” Washington Post, July 6, 2014, http://wapo.st/2jvSSg7. My response is at Barton Gellman, “How 160,000 Intercepted Communications Led to Our Latest NSA Story,” Washington Post, July 11, 2014, http://wapo.st/1Mq04zI.

  “Metadata absolutely tells you”: Stewart Baker, quoted in Alan Rusbridger, “The Snowden Leaks and the Public,” New York Review of Books, November 21, 2013.

  “We kill people”: Michael V. Hayden remarks, “The Price of Privacy: Re-evaluating the NSA,” Johns Hopkins University, April 1, 2014, at https://youtu.be/UdQiz0Vavmc?t=27s.

  “we don’t hold data”: Keith Alexander, “Cyber Security Threats to the United States,” American Enterprise Institute, July 9, 2012. The video is at the 50-minute mark of www.c-span.org/video/?306956-1/cybersecurity-threats-us. He made similar remarks at the Def Con security conference in Las Vegas two weeks later. See Kim Zetter, “NSA Chief Tells Hackers His Agency Doesn’t Create Dossiers on All Americans,” Wired, July 27, 2012, www.wired.com/2012/07/nsa-chief-denies-dossiers/.

  “Does the NSA collect”: The full exchange, and Clapper’s explanation nearly three years later, are on “IC on the Record,” the DNI’s Tumblr account, in a posting dated February 7, 2016, at https://icontherecord.tumblr.com/post/139489829858/why-did-you-lie-about-nsa-surveillance-in-front-of. It is also available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsmo0hUWJ08. Clapper initially told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that his reply to Wyden was the “least untruthful” response he could offer in an unclassified setting. In the 2016 posting, he said, “I simply didn’t think of the business records telephony metadata” as he replied. “Instead, I thought of content.”

  accused him of perjury: On March 12, 2018, the five-year statute of limitations for such a charge expired. See Steven Nelson, “James Clapper Avoids Charges for ‘Clearly Erroneous’ Surveillance Testimony,” Washington Examiner, March 10, 2018, https://perma.cc/DE8B-7UDL.

  made a clumsy job of it: Wyden’s staff sent advance word to Clapper that the senator would ask that question, but Litt, the DNI lawyer, said the message got stuck on his desk in the crush of business. Clapper, he said, did not see it coming. Rob
ert Litt, interview with author, 2014.

  only twenty-one such orders: Statistical tables based on government disclosures are assembled by the Electronic Privacy Information Center at www.epic.org/privacy/surveillance/fisa/stats/.

  cleaned up the list: Several months later, an independent government report confirmed this surmise. “Upon the arrival of new records at the NSA, agency technical personnel perform a number of steps to ensure that the records, which come from different telephone companies, are in a standard format compatible with the NSA’s databases.” Privacy and Civil Liberty Oversight Board, Report on the Telephone Records Program Conducted Under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and on the Operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, January 23, 2014, perma.cc/Y7F3-EZBX (PDF).

  “database of ruin”: Paul Ohm, “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization,” UCLA Law Review 57 (2010): 1701, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1450006.

  “if revealed, would cause”: Paul Ohm, “Don’t Build a Database of Ruin,” Harvard Business Review, August 23, 2012, https://hbr.org/2012/08/dont-build-a-database-of-ruin.

  Chekhov’s famous admonition: The best-known version is: “If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.” Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). Chekhov meant that a playwright should not break an implicit promise to the audience, but the expectations behind that promise have their roots in observed experience of the world. Most weapons are used eventually. In surveillance as in war, capabilities once invented are put to use.

  “Is It the End”: The presentation was prepared by technical managers tasked with improving data quality. “Is It the End of the SIGINT World as We Have Come to Know It? Do You Feel Fine?,” May 10, 2012, on file with author.

  “the vice president’s special program”: See Gellman, Angler, chapters 11 and 12.

  fifty state-of-the-art computer servers: “FY-2002 Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) Project Baseline Standards and Architecture Assessment Activity,” on file with author.