FBI director Comey said
today that Hillary Clinton running emails containing government
information on an unsecured, private server was not as bad as former CIA
director Petraeus sharing classified documents with his lover.
But the highest-level NSA whistleblower in history, William Binney – the NSA executive who created
the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, the
36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency, who
served as the senior technical director within the agency, and managed
six thousand NSA employees – explains why Comey’s statement is nonsense.
By way of background, recall that – when the American press reported
that U.S. intelligence services tracked Bin Laden through his satellite
phone – he stopping using that type of phone … so we could no longer
easily track him.
This is exactly what government
officials mean whenever they say that someone – say Edward Snowden,
Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, or Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning – is
threatening national security by “revealing confidential
information-gathering methods or sources.”
Also by way of background, Binney pointed us to an article from March written by former NSA analyst, counterintelligence officer and War College professor John Schindler:
Just-released State Department documents obtained by Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act [here] detail a bureaucratic showdown between Ms. Clinton and NSA at the outset of her tenure at Foggy Bottom.
***
One
senior NSA official, now retired, recalled the kerfuffle with Team
Clinton in early 2009 about Blackberrys. “It was the usual Clinton prima
donna stuff,” he explained, “the whole ‘rules are for other people’ act
that I remembered from the ’90s.” Why Ms. Clinton would not simply
check her personal email on an office computer, like every other
government employee less senior than the president, seems a germane
question, given what a major scandal email-gate turned out to be. “What
did she not want put on a government system, where security people might
see it?” the former NSA official asked, adding, “I wonder now, and I
sure wish I’d asked about it back in 2009.”
He’s not the only NSA
affiliate with pointed questions about what Hillary Clinton and her
staff at Foggy Bottom were really up to—and why they went to such
trouble to circumvent federal laws about the use of IT systems and the
handling of classified information.
***
As I explained in this column
in January, one of the most controversial of Ms. Clinton’s emails
released by the State Department under judicial order was one sent on
June 8, 2011, to the Secretary of State by Sidney Blumenthal, Ms.
Clinton’s unsavory
friend and confidant who was running a private intelligence service for
Ms. Clinton. This email contains an amazingly detailed assessment of
events in Sudan, specifically a coup being plotted by top generals in
that war-torn country. Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from a
top-ranking source with direct access to Sudan’s top military and
intelligence officials, and recounted a high-level meeting that had
taken place only 24 hours before.
To anybody familiar with
intelligence reporting, this unmistakably signals intelligence, termed
SIGINT in the trade. In other words, Mr. Blumenthal, a private citizen
who had enjoyed no access to U.S. intelligence for over a decade when he
sent that email, somehow got hold of SIGINT about the Sudanese
leadership and managed to send it, via open, unclassified email, to his
friend Ms. Clinton only one day later.
NSA officials were appalled by the State Department’s release of this email, since it bore all the hallmarks of Agency reporting. Back in early January when I reported this, I was confident that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from highly classified NSA sources,
based on my years of reading and writing such reports myself, and one
veteran agency official told me it was NSA information with “at least 90
percent confidence.”
Now, over two months later, I can confirm
that the contents of Sid Blumenthal’s June 8, 2011, email to Hillary
Clinton, sent to her personal, unclassified account, were indeed based on highly sensitive NSA information.
The agency investigated this compromise and determined that Mr.
Blumenthal’s highly detailed account of Sudanese goings-on, including
the retelling of high-level conversations in that country, was indeed
derived from NSA intelligence.
Specifically, this
information was illegally lifted from four different NSA reports, all of
them classified “Top Secret / Special Intelligence.” Worse, at least
one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an
NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information
(for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership,
as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access
Program, or SAP, several of which from the CIA Ms. Clinton compromised
in another series of her “unclassified” emails.
Currently
serving NSA officials have told me they have no doubt that Mr.
Blumenthal’s information came from their reports. “It’s word-for-word,
verbatim copying,” one of them explained. “In one case, an entire
paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified Top Secret /
Special Intelligence.
How Mr. Blumenthal got his hands on this
information is the key question, and there’s no firm answer yet. The
fact that he was able to take four separate highly classified NSA
reports—none of which he was supposed to have any access to—and pass the
details of them to Hillary Clinton via email only hours after NSA
released them in Top Secret / Special Intelligence channels indicates
something highly unusual, as well as illegal, was going on.
Binney explained to Washington’s Blog the serious nature of Clinton’s breach of GAMMA classified information:
The
compromise of this kind of cryptology success has a number of impacts
on the ability of NSA to produce accurate intelligence on foreign
targets of highest interest.
(1) This lets the leaders of a
foreign country know that their communications have been compromised and
thatwe read what they are saying, planning and intending to do.
(2)
It compromises the fact that a particular type of encryption is
readable. Not just the leadership; but, also all the others in that
country and around the world that are using that encryption.
(3) It lets our potential adversaries know our technology capabilities in attacking encryption.
(4)
If other countries (like Russia or China or any others) know the
encryption system involved, then they too will look at it for any
weakness or flaws that would allow reading the system.
(5) It
alerts adversaries to look into that system for structural errors in
encryption design also look for human error in using the system or a
combination of both that would make the system vulnerable.
(6)
This presents the country using that system the opportunity to feed
false information into the intelligence produced by NSA which means the
free world.
(7) For NSA, this means that they have to find other
ways to validate any intelligence they get from this encryption to
insure the validity of the information they get.
The target
country may stop using that encryption for leadership (as was the case
with GAMMA GUPY) but may continue to use it at other levels of
communication; but, over time, they have been alerted to this weakness
and will move as fast as they can to replace it with other encryption.
GAMMA GUPY was the U.S. spy program
which installed an antenna on the roof of the United States Embassy in
Moscow to eavesdrop on top officials of the Soviet Union in Moscow as
they chatted with each other on their car telephones. When
nationally-syndicated journalist Jack Anderson reported on GAMMA GUPY in
1971, it alerted the Soviet leadership … so they immediately stopped talking in a way that could be overheard.
Binney continued:
This
[Clinton’s email hijinks] is real serious, on the order of what Jack
Anderson compromises in 1971 dealing with the “Gamma Gupy” source.
This
is the most sensitive intelligence, and [Clinton] and her staff took it
out of classified reports and put excerpts in open source on her
server.
***
All in all, this is a rather devastating compromise of technical capability and a commensurate loss of high value intelligence.
I
know this kind of technical explanation is rather difficult for the
public to understand and comprehend, but it is rather devastating to
people responsible for intelligence production.
In my view, this is much worse than what Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning or any of the other whistleblowers have done.
Some
are in prison for as many as 35 years. Others have just been ruined and
kept from getting anything but menial jobs. But, those in high
positions get a pass for much worse offenses.
via http://ift.tt/29DQX5X George Washington