11/19/15 – Marcy Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay.
Our first guest today is our good friend, Marcy Wheeler.
They call her Empty Wheel in the blogosphere.
Emptywheel.net is her great blog, and it ain't just her.
There's a couple other great writers there too.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Marcy?
I'm doing all right.
How are you?
I'm doing really good.
Good to see you in Slate here.
I imagine that means some kind of expanded audience for the moment, at least.
A few more eyeballs picking up what you're putting down.
I like the sound of that.
Metadata surveillance didn't stop the Paris attacks.
You don't say.
Oh my gosh, an attack happened.
I guess not.
Well, look, I mean, so it must be because you or Glenn Greenwald or Edward Snowden or James Bamford or somebody screwed up their attempts to keep us safe, right?
How dare you?
Oh my gosh.
Or maybe the people in Daily Beast who revealed very specifically what kind of wiretapping the NSA was doing on Al-Qaeda.
But no one ever wants to talk about that because those guys are neocons.
Oh yeah, there you go.
I guess maybe, yeah, let's not talk about that then.
We got to cover for them.
Are you talking about Josh Rogan?
Yeah.
And what specifically did he reveal?
Oh, and how does it compare to what Snowden revealed?
In 2013, it wasn't just him.
It was a bunch of other.
It was actually probably Yemen who revealed it to journalists.
But then journalists here, including at The New York Times, McClatchy and Daily Beast, added a lot of details about the fact that NSA had compromised basically the conference calling system that AQAP was using.
So they went elsewhere after that.
But if you recall, back in 2013, we shut down a bunch of embassies in the Middle East.
This was after the Snowden leaks, but not very long after.
It had nothing to do with the Snowden leaks.
And that's the kind of thing that's even more dangerous because terrorists do something and you go, hey, we just overheard you.
And the terrorist is like, oh, maybe I should find a new way to talk to my buddies.
Same thing happened in 2009 with Anwar al-Awlaki.
Pete Hoekstra was trying to score political points.
He basically announced that Awlaki was being wiretapped and Awlaki was like, I think I'll start using encryption.
So lots of stuff like that happens and those guys never get held responsible.
Okay, well, look, my biases are clear here.
But so let me sum this up.
And I know you'll be objective and honest and tell me if I go off the story here and screw it up.
But isn't it more or less basically right that what Snowden did is say, hey, everybody, you know how we all know the NSA is tapping the hell out of everybody in the world.
Well, the news is they're doing that to Americans, too.
Isn't that what Snowden did?
That's not all that Snowden did.
I mean, I think he made it.
Look, a lot of what Snowden revealed is that there's nowhere to hide or you have to go to great lengths to hide.
But you know what?
You know how the terrorists have been learning that since 9-11?
Every time a drone strike kills a terrorist, the terrorists around him like talk to each other and they go, oh, maybe we should start taking the battery out of our phone.
And they've been doing that for over a decade, which is precisely what you would do to avoid surveillance under the dragnet that Snowden revealed.
So, I mean, he did reveal stuff.
But not, I mean, that's one of, you know, that's one of one of the things, one of the most specific things I think that happened that we can attribute to Edward Snowden is that Europe used it as an opportunity to say, let's help our tech industry and invent reasons not to, for example, the safe harbor agreement, you know, to say, well, we can't share data with Facebook anymore.
So let's let's make that more difficult.
And there were good reasons to do that from the EU's perspective.
But one of the things that happened this week is everyone started blaming Telegram, which is a messaging app that's headquartered in Berlin.
And John Brennan gave a speech, which I think was misreported as being entirely about encryption and Edward Snowden.
And the next day, Telegram for the first time started shutting down what are called channels that ISIS was using.
And one of if there was a gap in in the NSA surveillance, as distinct from Europe surveillance, which we can talk about, but if there was a gap about what ISIS was doing, it's that they were planning their attacks on a non-US tech companies services.
If it had been US, then it would have come under prism.
And the NSA would have had a far easier time to spy on them, along with everybody else.
And that's the problem is, you know, that that the United States has been relying on several kinds of technological advantages we have, both that all of the telephone fiber goes through the United States, and that all the big tech companies are American.
And, and the US has been using that to spy on the rest of the world, which is great if you're helping the rest of the world prevent terrorism.
But it's terrible if you're also spying on the business doings of the rest of the world or spying on, you know, the presidents of the rest of the world or what have you.
And so basically, the US abused those advantages, and the rest of the world responded as you would expect them to.
And as a result, those advantages are being taken away.
And that's not surprising.
But but the way to avoid that was to not abuse those advantages in the first place.
Yeah, actions having consequences.
That's an alien concept when you're talking about executive branch employees, for sure.
Well, the whole lot of them.
Alright, so now, you know, all the news is coming out this morning and TechDirt has this thing saying after all the endless demonization of encryption, please find the Paris attackers coordinated via unencrypted SMS.
So, you know, in other words, they added so much hay to the stack, they couldn't find what was should have been right in their face.
Well, and here's what I talk about in slate.
You know, I think we'll probably find that the terrorists did use encryption in some ways beyond, by the way, the one piece of encryption we know that they use, this is really funny, because no one wants to give this up, is that one of them took his own credit card in his own name and paid for a hotel with it.
And when you do that online, they use HTTPS to protect you from somebody else intercepting your credit card information and then going on a shopping spree with it.
And so if Diane Feinstein and all the rest of them want to prohibit the encryption that the terrorists use, then we're all going to lose the ability to pay for stuff online because that's the only thing we have confirmed that terrorists used as far as encryption yet.
But, you know, I think we'll find that they used some.
I think we'll find that they used operational security that's not terrorism, that's, excuse me, that's not encryption.
But the point I made in slate is that this dragnet that we have, if it is supposed to work, it failed.
I mean, its job is, its job comes prior to encryption.
And its job, it works when it works, whether or not you're using encrypted calls, because you can't hide metadata, or for the most part, you can't hide metadata.
So in other words, if the dragnet works, it should capture who's communicating with whom.
And when you see that a guy that has been involved in planning three earlier plots is communicating with a guy in Paris, you go send the cops to that guy in Paris, because chances are good he's going to be involved in a plot.
And that's what didn't happen.
And that's where we can say with some certainty that the dragnet failed.
Yeah.
I wonder what's their excuse, because here we would just go, oh, well, obviously the feds were busy entrapping some idiot into some fake plot, and they missed the real one, like the Boston attack.
But I wonder what it is with the French, because it seems pretty clear, right?
I mean, and this guy, as we're finding out now, he was buddies with the guy that did the foiled train attack, and he was associated with the guy that attacked the Jewish Museum in Brussels.
And so, you know, absolutely, if this was a primetime TV show, they would have been nabbed before they were able to get this done, strictly because of the computer technology that would have enabled it.
Anyway, so we got to stop and take this break.
We'll be right back in just a sec with the great Marcy Wheeler, EmptyWheel.net.
That's her handle on Twitter, too, Empty Wheel.
Just a sec, y'all.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Marcy Wheeler from EmptyWheel.net about Big Brother and the successful Paris attacks.
The Paris attacks weren't stopped by metadata surveillance.
That hasn't stopped officials from saying it might have.
That's one of the titles.
That's not the title.
Metadata surveillance did not stop the Paris attacks.
That's the title at slate.com.
And so, yeah, I kind of wonder why not.
I mean, obviously, the simple answer would just be too much data, not enough employee human eyeballs on the data to make sense of it.
Marcy, is that it?
I provide some potential explanations in that article.
I think the Abaoud guy that they just announced the death of today, back in January, there were some reports.
Remember, one of the plots he was involved with, they thwarted in Belgium in February or January.
And there were some reports from back then which, A, talked about him using a series of burner phones, so he would get cheap cell phones.
And he had five in the period where they were watching him.
But nevertheless, it took some doing, but they were able to track him.
After that happened, he's going to improve on what he had been doing, which is a series of burner phones.
In addition, so that's one thing.
And if I were him, I would have moved from actual telephony to like an iPod, so that I was using just internet access rather than telephone access.
And that means you don't get the same kind of location data.
So I suspect that his operational security, which was already very good, got better after that thwarted attack in January and February.
And that's one of the reasons.
I suspect that, and I've heard, that the analysis process, you know, so they pull in all of this metadata, and then they do a process called triaging.
And that process is supposed to tell them which are the most important networks to go hunt down.
And from what we can even see with the Snowden documents, that's not very sophisticated.
It involves how often have you called this person, what have past captured conversations involved.
And so that's not going to catch everyone all the time.
Because, frankly, the problem with that approach to assigning value to a network or to communication is it works for Target.
You know, Target can use big data to figure out who's pregnant before the woman knows herself based on what she's buying.
Because there are tons of pregnant ladies out there.
And many, many, many of them shop at Target.
Whereas there aren't that many terrorists.
And so big data simply isn't going to work as well as it does for Target because there aren't as many.
Their habits are going to evolve.
You know, a pregnant lady doesn't get drone killed if she buys chocolate, just like every pregnant lady before her has done.
Whereas a terrorist who sees his buddy get killed in a drone strike is going to stop engaging in the same behavior that that buddy did.
And so they're going to change.
And so that analysis process is never going to work 100 percent of the time.
And I don't think it's even as sophisticated as it could be.
And then, you know, there's probably inspires a lot of false confidence, though, right?
Right.
I mean, and that's the problem with this entire conversation we've had since Snowden.
I'm actually sympathetic because in Belgium, in France, there are tons of fairly extremist young men.
And and and there are tons of people who've come back from Syria.
And that problem.
I mean, one of the reasons why the dragnet has always, quote, unquote, worked here in the United States is there simply aren't that many Islamic terrorists here, contrary to what the government would like you to know.
But but in France and in Belgium, there really are.
And so, you know, they're going to miss people because there simply aren't enough bodies to go chase down every potentially really dangerous network.
One hopes that the dragnet helps them prioritize who to chase down.
And in this case, it really should have because it's clear they had communications with the two guys they're calling masterminds, but two guys who have really clear ties to ISIS and past terrorist events.
So it should have in this case.
It didn't.
But, you know, let's be honest, France has a much more difficult time preventing terrorist attacks than the NYPD has.
And so they are going to miss some from time to time.
And they did.
But here's the problem is since the Snowden leak started, there's been this patent dishonesty, which says you all have to sacrifice more and more and more privacy because to to set up this dragnet, which we promise you is going to prevent the next terrorist attack.
And because they oversold those promises, we did not engage in in a real conversation about where the proper line was to draw.
And frankly, about, you know, I mean, here's another thing about these guys is, again, back in January, they discovered that these guys were using what's probably Berber, right?
So Arabic, but a kind of Arabic used primarily in in the southern part of Morocco and Algeria up in the hills.
And and so even, you know, it's bad enough that they weren't speaking in French, which would have been easier for Belgian wiretappers to understand.
It's bad enough that they were speaking in Arabic.
So you have to go get an Arabic translator to understand the wire taps.
But they were speaking in a dialect of Arabic that is that is particularly inaccessible.
And so and probably encoded in the same way that the NAV that we employed, the United States employed the Navajo in World War Two.
So you had this group of men who have a dialect that is fairly inaccessible, and that they were kind of enhancing on their own on their own purposes.
Well, that works the same as encryption does, meaning that works to prevent or to to because look, the NSA can get around encryption.
So if they know a conversation is important enough, they'll do that.
But a really difficult language with some dialect and some code involved is going to take the same kind of hoop jumping that encrypted communication will take.
But particularly in the United States, particularly, I mean, you know, one of the disclosures that that Snowden released, which I think should have gotten far, far more attention is we don't have the translators we need.
And one of the reasons we don't have the translators we need is because, you know, the security process and so on and so forth.
And so so one of the conversations we maybe should be having that would be more productive than whether or not we have to stop all encryption, which will expose our bank accounts and so on, is whether we have enough translators in the target languages or or whether that's a way to improve the functionality of this dragnet much more quickly and more safely.
Because if you know, the more we prohibit encryption, the more the hackers are going to get us until Friday, right?
The hackers were the bad guys.
That's who Dianne Feinstein was most afraid of.
Now she wants to make it easier for people to hack Sony because of terrorists.
And, you know, and maybe the answer is not about encryption or not encryption, but instead finding somebody who speaks Berber and making sure that the NSA has enough of them to be able to actually read the conversations about an attack before it happens.
Well, what you need is a really politically connected translator contractor company to get the incentive system working right in D.C. because as it is right now, there's a hell of a lot more money in computer specialties than language ones.
It seems like it's going to stay that way.
We're out of time.
Thanks so much, Marcy.
You do great work.
Thanks so much.
That is the great Marcy Wheeler.
She's empty wheel online, empty wheel dot net.
And here she is at Slate.
Metadata surveillance didn't stop the Paris attacks.
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