In the immediate wake of the early NSA revelations, the agency’s director, General Keith Alexander, claimed the NSA surveillance had contributed to the prevention of 54 plots. But that number has been picked apart by the US media and Congress, forcing the NSA to revise it down. ProPublica have factchecked the 54 plots claim here and could only find evidence of four. Eventually, deputy NSA director John Inglis conceded that, at most, one plot — which he has not specified — might have been disrupted by the bulk phone records program alone. Internet companies have given assurances to their users about the security of communications. But the Snowden documents reveal that US and British intelligence agencies have successfully broken or circumvented much of online encryption. Much of this, the documents reveal, was not done through traditional code-cracking, but instead by making deals with the industry to introduce weaknesses or backdoors into commercial encryption – and even working to covertly undermine the international standards on which encryption relies. Computer security experts say that by doing this in their quest to access ever more data, the intelligence agencies have compromised the computers of hundreds of millions of ordinary internet users, and undermined one their other key priorities – protecting the US and UK from cyberattacks. The publication of the Verizon phone records order had one immediate political impact. It revealed that at a Senate committee hearing in March 2013, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, had given misleading testimony. He was asked by Senator Ron Wyden whether the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans”. Clapper’s reply: “No, sir”. Forced to revise his answer after the Guardian published the document in June, Clapper at first said that he had given “the least untruthful answer” possible in a public hearing. But then it emerged that Wyden’s office had given the DNI 24 hours notice of the question, and an opportunity to correct the record the next day. Clapper changed his account to say that he had simply forgotten about collection of domestic phone records. The erroneous testimony sparked calls for Clapper’s dismissal and has become a glaring example of failings in the oversight arrangements that are supposed to govern NSA surveillance programs.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 04:35:17 +0000