This is a continuation of an earlier post (http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2013/05/spies.html). It is a result of the now long series of revelations credited to Edward Snowden. There are more revelations today and it looks like they will continue for some time. I am not interested in getting stuck in "revelation of the day" mode like the media. Instead, since the revelations have been going on for some time, I think there are some "big picture" observations to make.
Recently Snowden has been revealing that the NSA has been spying on pretty much everybody, friends and enemies alike. This is "shocking news" to the media and our allies. There are two things going on here. In the case of the news its the result of a lack of journalistic competence and the usual "fixate on the shiny object" mentality that governs news decisions. In the case of our allies its a matter of gaining a tactical advantage in the "power" game. I'll be back with more on both these subjects but first let me step back.
We have had two giant leakers in the last few years, Edward Snowden and, before him, Bradley Manning. At the personal level they are completely different. But at a higher level they are both the same. Ben Franklin in the 1700's famously opined "three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead". It's a cute way at getting to the fact that a secret shared among a lot of people is bound to leak out. Franklin's idea of "a lot" was three. So how many people have access to classified data? The Atlantic Magazine, among many other sources, reports that the answer is staggeringly high. This post (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/06/contract-security-clearance-charts/66059/) is chock full of numbers. But let's just focus on "Top Secret" (supposedly the "all access" highest level but actually not). The Atlantic reports that nearly half a million people (including at one time both Manning and Snowden) have this level of access.
If half a million people have access to information what's the chance it will stay secret? The answer is known to extremely high precision. There is exactly zero chance that the information will stay secret for any length of time. We know about Manning and Snowden. But how about the people we don't know about because they haven't gone public with a big splash and gotten a lot of media coverage? Madden and Snowden were both Americans that chose to take what they learned to the press. What about the possibility of people taking this kind of information to Al Qaeda or the Taliban?
Actually, I think this is unlikely. Both of these organizations smell bad and the intelligence agencies track them closely. So, if they managed to get an inside connection it is likely the intelligence community would get a whiff. But it is not impossible. In the '30s the Russians managed to infiltrate a number of people into British Intelligence. They ultimately rose to occupy positions at the highest levels of MI6. They were not exposed until decades later. If you want details, check out the Wikipedia page on "Cambridge 5". I will have more to say on who is more likely to have gotten their hands on this kind of material later but first . . .
Manning and Snowden share another attribute. Both were very low level employees with some technical expertise. Manning's technical skill was sufficient to land him a job as a "developer" at a software company before he enlisted in the military. Snowden did "IT Security" work and was a Systems Administrator working on classified facilities during his tenure within various components of the intelligence community. Neither of them made any kind of mark as some kind of super computer guy. As far as I can tell they were both journeyman IT types. I am very familiar with this type because it's the kind of work I spent my professional life at. We are smarter than average but there are lots of us.
Manning and Snowden are also similar in that there are red flags associated with both of them. Manning had a long history of personal problems. He now claims to have "gender identity disorder". He had no business having access to classified data and a competent background check would have shown this. But he got his "Top Secret" ticket punched anyhow, apparently without difficulty. (This is another thread that has received little coverage.) As far as I know there is nothing in Snowden's background or makeup that would have alerted anyone. But there is a fundamental question, mostly unasked, as to why either of them had access to the information they had access to.
Manning was in the Army and was doing intelligence work related to the Iraq war. He was a Private and his duties had nothing to do with anything diplomatic? So why did he have access to hundreds of thousands of supposedly classified diplomatic documents? Neither his rank (as low as it goes) nor his duties (supporting the Army mission in Iraq) justify access to these documents? They didn't but he obviously obtained access anyhow. As far as I can tell the security on the server that held these documents was so lax that someone with a modest amount of computer expertise and an interest in finding them was able to bypass security. And as far as I can tell, Manning's access did not set off any alarms. After the story broke and people traced his activities (probably with Manning's help), only then did anyone know what had gone wrong. If an Army Private in Iraq could gain access to these documents, then who else could? The answer is hundreds of thousands of people.
The Snowden case is similar. I think Snowden's IT expertise was greater. And, since Snowden came later, he was in a position to learn from Manning's experience. But Snowden was not interested in keeping his identity secret for any length of time as Manning had been. Snowden was also more intelligent (in my opinion) and did not have the many personal problems Manning had. He had, as far as I can tell a very nice and very pretty (the pictures prove this) girlfriend. And before everything blew up they seemed to be having a good relationship. But at bottom the Snowden case is like the Manning case in the sense that it is important to ask the question "why did he have access to those documents?"
By the nature of the job, System Administrators have a lot of access. Among their duties is that of setting and maintaining security levels for all the parts of whatever systems they administer. They know the security controls better than anyone else. It's their job. And its a very unsexy job. So it's the type of job that attracts "slow track" management types to the supervisory positions above them. These management types also frequently get yelled at for doing their job too well. It is common for one of them to get called on the carpet because some well connected hotdog can't get access to something he wants to get access to but is not supposed to get access to. These management types tend to be happy when no one is yelling at them rather than being happy when their subordinates are doing their jobs well. So the quality of work frequently depends more than it should on the personal skill and moral fortitude of low level people like Snowden.
That's inside baseball. Its something I know because I've been there. But there is a huge red flag that Snowden raised and the media has completely ignored. Snowden said he got his last job at Booz Allen specifically because it would permit him broader access to the kind of material he was interested in. There has been no follow up by the media on this. Booz Allen has been around a long time. They have been successful at getting and keeping defense and intelligence contracts for a long time.
This depends on getting and keeping profitable contracts. It is more important to keep the government people who award contracts happy than it is to do good work. In short, they have mastered the office politics of keeping in the good graces of the military and intelligence community brass. What they look for from someone like Snowden is an ability to do adequate quality work quickly and an ability to not embarrass the brass. A good way to do this is to take shortcuts on the assumption you will not get caught. Shortcuts result in security loopholes that can be easily exploited by someone with the right mix of skill and knowledge.
Snowden was working in an obscure corner of the intelligence establishment in Hawaii. Like Manning in Iraq, it is hard to imagine a place further from the District of Columbia, home of the State Department and the NSA. But in this modern era networking makes distance unimportant. Connectivity is what is important. It is now obvious that connectivity permitted Manning to access political documents presumably housed on State Department servers. It is now also obvious that connectivity permitted Snowden to access political/management documents presumably housed on NSA servers. The NSA prides itself on being the best damn security shop in the world by a mile. What we now know Snowden successfully accessed (and again as far as we know without raising alarms) should be profoundly embarrassing to the NSA. I note that so far I haven't heard of any NSA brass or contracting companies getting fired.
Now let me circle back to the "who else could get access" question. Any "secret" held by hundreds of thousands of people is not a secret. What is surprising about the revelations credited to Manning and Snowden is not what they revealed. It's that these secrets and others like them haven't been revealed tens, hundreds, even thousands of other times. And this begs the question of whether they in fact haven't.
And this brings us to the dumb show and corresponding media coverage of the "shocking revelations" that the NSA has been spying on "friendly" foreign diplomats. The best single reference on intelligence matters up to and through World War II is "The Code Breakers" by David Kahn. People have between concealing messages going back at least to the Egyptians and the Romans. And during this entire period other people have been trying to "crack" these concealed messages, and they have often been remarkably successful.
The modern era of this sort of thing goes back hundreds of years in Europe. And it's not just Europe. The ancient Chinese were also noted for this sort of thing. Anyhow, in the European era it was common for governments to create "black chambers". Mail would be intercepted, opened, copied, and put back into circulation in such a manner that the tampering was nearly impossible to detect. The copied messages were decoded and the contents used to political and military advantage. And the old dictate "keep your enemies close and your friends closer" was the order of the day.
Certainly all kinds of means were used in time of war. But efforts continued during peacetime. The Russians famously spied on everyone including their erstwhile friends the British, French, and Americans during the thirties. And it's not just the "bad old Ruskies" or, before you ask, the "bad old Nazis". Angela Merkel, the current German Chancellor was born and raised in what was then East Germany. The East Germans ran a large, extensive, and very effective spying operation into what was then West Germany. Some of it was for their Russian masters but a lot of it was for domestic consumption.
And then there's the French. They have been running a large industrial/political espionage operation for decades. A friend of mine worked for Boeing for a while. Boeing gave employees traveling in France explicit instructions for taking extraordinary security measures while traveling in France. Why? France was interested in both of Boeing's lines of business. They are competitors in civil aviation against Boeing commercial jets and in the military sphere, selling fighter jets and other kinds of equipment that Boeing Defense and Space also sells.
But you say "it was the cold war" in response to East Germany or "we've never been that close" in response to France. Well, how about an ally that is closer to us than anyone but the U.K., Israel. There have been not one but several scandals involving Israel spying on us. And that ignores the time the Israelis sank a U.S. spy ship during the "Six Day War" in the '60s. The official story is that it was "accidental" but that's an obvious cover story, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". Why was the ship sunk? Because the Israeli military had some tricks up its sleeve that they didn't want the U.S. to know about.
Both Manning and Snowden have exposed secrets. The official line is that these are very damaging to U.S. interests. And they are. But they are not damaging because foreigners, especially the Europeans, didn't know these things. It's because they no longer have "plausible deniability". They could no longer pretend they didn't know these things. And that's embarrassing to them. It makes them look incompetent to the people that elect them. If you are embarrassed by some one, in this case the U.S., then you want to hit back. So we are being hounded from all sides.
It's also useful to get and apply whatever leverage comes your way when dealing with a powerful country like the U.S. There may be some countries like Brazil where these revelations may actually be a surprise. But here too, the U.S. has been treating Central and South American countries as second class citizens for at least a hundred years. And we have repeatedly meddled in their internal affairs. Quick: How many coup attempts has the U.S. sponsored in South America? How about Central America? So if you are a Central or South American country and you get a chance to get a little back from the U.S., it's an opportunity not to be wasted.
All of the above is publically known to people who take the time to become informed. It would be nice if the media took the time to become informed or assumed the public had the sophistication of a tree squirrel. But they don't. And the public time after time vindicates the media's low opinion of their viewers and (small number of remaining) readers. It's very depressing.
And it's worth while taking a look at how we got here. A standard bureaucratic tactic is to engage in empire building, gathering more power at the expense of your bureaucratic colleagues. One of the manifestations of empire building is what are often referred to as "silos". These are tube-like structures within which information flows up and down the organization. They are nicknamed silos because information does not flow across to other parallel organizations. We saw this in the run up to 9/11. The CIA didn't share with the FBI and the NSA didn't share with anybody. As a result the pattern wasn't clear because people inside one silo couldn't see the information in the other silos. After 9/11 sharing was the new thing. So databases were opened up and linked together. This was done quickly and sloppily.
And at the same time vast new databases (i.e. all the telephone records the NSA now routinely collects) were put online and connected up so that everyone (as in hundreds of thousands of people) could see everything. The government went from not enough sharing to too much sharing. Everyone with a Top Secret clearance can see everything. No one wants to be the person who stopped some other person from seeing some piece of data that would have stopped a terrorist attack. And no one wants to be the person who stops some massive collection project that could have collected the piece of information that could have stopped a terrorist attack. We are seeing this latter effect play itself out in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. "Gee, if we had just collected some more data we could have stopped those guys." The problem the intelligence community now has is that they are literally drowning in data. So much stuff is coming in that no one can deal with any of it.
This is one of these "judgment" things. It requires judgment to decide how much is the right amount. But if judgment is applied then some of the time someone will get it wrong. And then someone will take a pot shot. Then everyone will hunker down and things will get even worse. And the media is the last to champion judgment and the application of common sense. It is much more fun and better for ratings to showcase some showboating politician jumping down the throat of someone who applied judgment and was unlucky. And it is an even better show to feature some loud mouth going after entirely the wrong target. I frequently despair of the media and the vast part of the audience who will not put the effort in to sorting the wheat from the chaff. But probably, "'twas ever thus".
