The New York Times
June 13, 2013
A Promise of Changes for Access to Secrets
By DAVID E. SANGER and JEREMY W. PETERS
WASHINGTON — The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee emerged from a classified briefing on Thursday about the leak of top secret surveillance programs and declared that Congress would soon consider legislation to sharply limit the access that private contractors — who operate much of the national security infrastructure — have to the nation’s most sensitive intelligence programs.
“We will certainly have legislation which will limit or prevent contractors from handling highly classified and technical data, and we will do some other things,” the chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, said after a review of the episodes attended by almost half of the members of the Senate.
Ms. Feinstein, a California Democrat, said that on Monday the National Security Agency would release more information about the potential terrorist attacks that had been thwarted by its surveillance programs. “There are more than you think,” she said a bit cryptically. The senator has been among the most vocal defenders of the program.
Earlier in the day, the security agency director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, vowed to clear up what he said were inaccuracies and misperceptions about what kind of data the agency collects, and how it uses it. But the disclosure of any further detail, he said, would have to navigate a delicate line between the public’s right to know and divulging material that could tip off enemies.
Edward J. Snowden, the 29-year old computer systems administrator who says he gave the documents about the telephone monitoring program and an Internet search program called Prism to The Washington Post and The Guardian of London, was an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, a private company that administers some of the most sensitive programs for the N.S.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.
If Congress enacted such limits it would force a widespread change in the way many of the country’s most delicate intelligence operations are run, and would most likely require the intelligence agencies to hire more staff members of their own to do work that in recent years has increasingly been outsourced.
It is unclear how broadly Congress would endorse such changes.
“We have a real double standard,” said Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, as he emerged from the meeting. “A few weeks ago we were all complaining that we didn’t have enough information about those kids in Boston and we needed broader intelligence sharing,” he said, referring to the two chief suspects in the marathon bombings. “Now we say we want to clamp down on how the information moves.”
Intelligence officials said that limiting the role of companies like Booz Allen would probably prove far more complex than it appears on the surface.
“These are not just operators sitting at some computer console,” one senior official said. “Oftentimes, the contractors develop the systems that they are running — they are frequently the innovative force. You want to think twice before you terminate that.”
A report published early this year by the office of the director of national intelligence underscored just how difficult it would be to limit the access of contractors. It showed that as of last Oct. 1, 483,263 contractors held Top Secret clearances, compared with 791,200 government employees. A half-million other contractors held lower-level secret and confidential clearances.
In a separate meeting Thursday on Capitol Hill the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, testified to the surveillance programs’ ability to detect terrorist activity, saying that they could have helped prevent the Sept. 11 attacks had they been in place before then. Mr. Mueller also said that one of the programs recently helped the authorities find a friend of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects in Florida.
General Alexander did not elaborate on what kinds of information the National Security Agency would disclose next week, beyond saying that it would involve statistics about the programs in question and give the public a better understanding of how valuable they are.
“We have pledged to be as transparent as possible,” he said after emerging from a classified briefing with members of the House. “I think it’s important that you have that information. But we don’t want to risk American lives in doing that. So what we’re being is very deliberate in this process so that we don’t end up causing a terrorist attack by giving out too much information.”
General Alexander appeared before reporters in the Capitol flanked by the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, and the committee’s senior Democrat, C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, a bipartisan show of unity reflecting the general agreement among Congressinal leaders that the surveillance programs are worthwhile and legal.
General Alexander took no questions from the news media.
Mr. Rogers said that grave damage had been done by the disclosure of the programs, which involve a huge database of the logs of nearly every domestic phone call made by Americans and the collection of information from American Internet companies like Google without individual court orders if the request is aimed at noncitizens abroad.
“The more we know, the more dangerous this situation becomes,” he said, adding that people believed to be intent on doing harm to Americans were already altering their activities since the existence of the programs became public.
Mr. Mueller said in his testimony that the N.S.A.’s surveillance programs, if in place in 2001, could have made a difference in halting the largest terrorist attacks in American history.
Before those attacks, he said, intelligence agencies were tracking one of the hijackers who lived in San Diego and were also looking closely at a Yemen-based safe house for Al Qaeda.
“They understood that that Al Qaeda safe house had a telephone number, but they could not know who was calling in to that particular — that particular safe house,” he said.
“We came to find out afterwards that the person who had called in to that safe house was al-Mihdhar, who was in the United States, in San Diego,” he said, referring to one of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar. “If we had had this program in place at the time, we would have been able to identify that particular telephone number in San Diego.”
The intelligence community’s failure to make that connection was a subject of extensive analysis in the independent 9/11 Commission report. It argued for far wider intelligence sharing. But it was that kind of sharing — placing information that was gathered by many different intelligence agencies into communal computer systems — that put a slide show of the Prism program, a ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and a presidential directive on cyber offense and defense into Mr. Snowden’s hands.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/us/nsa-chief-to-release-more-details-on-surveillance-programs.html?hp
she is an employee of the NSA.... 