Category Archives: NSA

Yes, that would be the same Susan Rice who made herself famous fordelivering outright lies on national television about the Benghazi terrorist attack, the nature of which the Obama administration was eager to deliberately distort for political reasons in the thick of a campaign. It would also be the same Susan Rice described by Newsweek as President Obama's "right-hand woman" in 2014. As Isaid on air yesterday, this whole Russia meddling/wiretap saga has become so convoluted and bereft of verifiable facts that it's quite difficult to keep following the plot. Here's my stab at a succinct summation: Ourintelligence agencies and members of relevant committees onboth sides of the aisle all agree that Moscow tried to meddle in the 2016 election. Theirclearpreference was to help Donald Trump and damage Hillary Clinton, whom they assumed would win anyway. The Kremlin has also deployed their propaganda and subterfuge toundermine Republicans, too. Their overarching goal is to undercut faith in the American system. And while there isno factualbasis forPresident Trump's counter-claim that his predecessor ordered his phones to be tapped, there are real indications that some people within Trump's orbit were monitored in some way -- and the series of one-sided leaks on that front does look to many like a deliberate push within elements of the government to damage Trump's presidency. There is alsono evidence that the Trump campaign coordinated or colluded with the Russians.

One of the latest twists in all of this wasthe claim by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a Republican, that Trump-tied officials whose communications had been incidentally intercepted (they themselves hadnot been targeted) as a part of foreign surveillance operations had their redacted identities "unmasked" last year. Who did this, and why -- especially since the intercepted communications in question allegedly had nothing to do with Russia? Late last week,Fox News' Adam Housley added some meat onto those suspicious bones, citing unnamed sources:

And nowEli Lake's reporting at Bloomberg appears to confirm what the rumor mill has been buzzing about for days --Rice was at the center of this:

Lake writes that given what is known about what happened, both the incidental collection and the unmasking were likely conducted within the confines of the law, but the episode raises new questions about (a) why a senior Obama official was so keen to identify the US citizens mentioned or involved in these conversations, (b) whether those conversations had any genuine investigative value beyond political curiosity (Housley's sources say no), and (c) how the existence of some of these conversations ended up gettingmore widely disseminated, eventually leaking into the press. The piecealso reminds readers that Ms. Rice claimed ignorance on the entire subject when she was asked about it a few weeks ago:

Perhaps there's an innocent explanation for all of this, and perhaps Rice believed she was answering that question accurately. But for previously-alluded-to reasons, it's hardly a stretch to imagine Rice flat-out lying on television. One of the indications that Chairman Nunes really had exposed something significant came last week camewhen the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff-- who has beenloudly attacking his GOP counterpart and spreadingunfounded claims and conspiracies related to the Russia probe -- got a look at the same documents Nunes saw (which led to Nunes'subsequent briefing of both President Trump and the newsmedia). AsRed State points out, Schiff emerged from that session fixated on process, while remaining notably mumon anything pertaining to content. It's not unreasonable to hypothesize that he read the documents and realized that something damaging lies within. Maybe that something was Barack Obama's lightning-rod NSA repeatedly requesting the unmasking of Trump officials' communications for dubious reasons.

For months, Democrats have insisted that the Russian meddling side of this story is the only thing thatmatters. While I agree that probes into those disquieting issues are justified and important, I've also taken the national security leak element of the controversy quite seriously. These new developments demand further inquiry and real answers. And today's introduction of an untrustworthy partisan actor within the previous president's inner-most circle into the mix all but guarantees that this story is about to become more politically explosive. I'll leave you withthis column by the Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel:

See the original post here:
Oh My: Former Obama NSA Susan Rice Reportedly Directed Dubious 'Unmasking' of Trump Allies - Townhall

Was Donald Trump wiretapped? Was the transition team under surveillance? There are more questions than answers, especially with the latter question, but one thing is clear: our intelligence community caught the Trump transition team through incidental collection. John Solomon and Sara Carter of Circa News reported that those logs are expected to be turned over to Congress next week, as they investigate possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia. Yet, they didnt get into the weeds concerning the allegations that have yet to unveil any solid evidence of collusion between Russia and Trumps campaign. Carter and Solomon decided to look into the regulations regarding NSA surveillance, which were changed under Obama that allowed unmasking of American caught through incidental collection topossibly become victim to political games.

Solomon and Carter also added that 16 other executive agencies, not just the FBI and CIA, can now ask for unmasked information after the Obama tweaks to NSA minimization protocols, the process in which the NSA conceals the identity of a citizen who was not subject to the FISA warrant. Its done either through redaction or naming them generically, like American No. 1. Yet, given the rise in lone wolf attacks, those procedures aimed at protecting privacy were reduced:

[]

The ACLU, an ally of Obama on many issues, issued a statement a few months ago warning that the presidents loosened procedures governing who could request or see unmasked American intercepts by the NSA were grossly inadequate and lacked appropriate safeguards.

Nunes, the House intelligence panel chairman who was not interviewed for this story, alleged in the last week he has received evidence that Obama administration political figures gained access to unmasked American identities through foreign intercepts involving the Trump transition team between November and January.

[]

as the U.S. intelligence community became more worried over the last decade about its ability to locate lone wolf terrorists, foreign spies and hackers in an increasingly digital world, Bush and Obama began relaxing the rules for minimization and increasing access to NSA collected information on Americans. In short, the Obama administration created a standard set of exceptions to the minimization rules.

One of those relaxations came in 2011 when Attorney General Eric Holder sent a memo to the FISA court laying out the rules for sharing unmasked intercepts of Americans captured incidentally by the NSA. The court approved the approach.

In 2015, those rules were adapted to determine not only how the FBI got access to unmasked intelligence from NSA or FISA intercepts but also other agencies. One of the requirements, the NSA and FBI had to keep good records of who requested and gained access to the unredacted information.

And in his final days in office, Obama created the largest ever expansion of access to non-minimized NSA intercepts, creating a path for all U.S. intelligence to gain access to unmasked reports by changes encoded in a Reagan-era Executive Order 12333.

The government officials who could request or approve an exception to unmask a U.S. citizens identity has grown substantially. The NSA now has 20 executives who can approve the unmasking of American information inside intercepts, and the FBI has similar numbers.

This isnt new concerning the game of government exploiting new technological features to maximize its power and take advantage of it before the courts can catch up.

Excerpt from:
Circa: Obama Intel Changes Could Have Allowed NSA Intercepts Of ... - Townhall

If youve ever wondered whether the National Security Agency (NSA) is monitoring your internet activity at any given moment, theres now an app for that.

A Canadian project by Internet Exchange Maps, called IXmaps, tracks the internet exchange points your information passes through. These points are buildings where your information passes along a wire and can be collected by the NSA.

Yes, a physical wire. Though we generally think of the internet as a cloud, all of our data travels along large wires and data points before it gets to its destination.Since our data travels through these wires, its much easier for the NSA to intercept, track, and store it for whatever means the agency finds necessary.

IXmaps uses traceroutes, a computer network diagnostic tool thattracks the various locations your data passes through before reaching its destination, and shows you if yourweb traffic passes through one of the NSAssuspected listening posts.Its highly likely the NSA has listening posts at buildings in New York and Utah.

Screengrab via IXmaps

Per the U.S. Constitution, U.S. citizens are granted a certain amount of internet privacy. These rights protect citizens from the tyrannical seizure of information collections from internet data. Whether or not those rights are acknowledged in NSA tracking is a different story, though, given the documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

For non-U.S. citizens, though, theres absolutely no protection and no boundaries for what the NSA can collect. IXmaps is a Canadian project, originally created to help Canadian citizens map their internet data. The Canadian constitution provides similar privacy protections to its citizens.

For financial and political reasons, many Canadian internet routes pass across the border into the U.S.a phenomenon known as boomerang routingbefore going back into Canada to its original destination. Since Canadian citizens have no privacy rights in the U.S., their data is often collected and stored without question.

IXmaps recently went public again after undergoing a redesign, and its working to expand its maps to across the globe, but that depends on individuals tracking and submitting their own traceroutes to the database.

Correction: An earlier version of this story conflated the wires used to transmit internet data with traceroutes. We regret the error.

H/T Motherboard

Excerpt from:
Here's how to tell if your web traffic travels through an NSA listening point - The Daily Dot

Former National Security Director Gen. Keith Alexander told members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a Thursday afternoon hearing on Russian meddling in the 2016 election cycle that he believes the country indeed interfered.

Thats one area where experts in the hearing on Russian interference and seemingly, members on both sides of the aisle were in agreement. Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the intelligence committees vice chairman, asked the witnesses if they had any doubt that Russians interfered in the 2016 election cycle.

I believe they were involved, Gen. Alexander said.

Fellow witnesses Kevin Mandia, chief executive officer of cybersecurity company FireEye, and Thomas Rid, professor at the Department of War Studies at Kings College in London, answered along similar lines. Mandia said it absolutely stretches credulity to think they were not involved. Rid said Russia seized an opportunity in 2016 when the U.S. was extremely polarized, politically speaking.

The more polarized a society, the more vulnerable it is, Rid said.

Democrats for monthshave called for a Capitol Hill probe into any Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, but the Republican-controlled intelligence committees are just now beginning to hold public hearings.

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio revealed in the hearing that would-be hackers with IP addresses in Russia attempted to sabotage his former presidential campaign staff as recently as Wednesday, giving weight to cybersecurity experts remarks in a hearing earlier Thursdayon the same topic that Russia isnt done intervening in U.S. politics.

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The Senate Intelligence Committee will hear from experts on Russian interference in the 2016 election. CBS News' Jeff Pegues reports from Washing...

The afternoon hearing came on the heels of a New York Times report that a pair of White House officials helped provide Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, with intelligence reports showing President Donald Trump and his associates were included in foreign surveillance sweeps by American spy agencies. Some critics fear Nunes is too close to Mr. Trump to handle investigations into any Russian interference into the presidential election.

During an earlier hearing on the same subject Thursday, cybersecurityexperts told the Senate panelthat Russia had every ability to create fake social media accounts by mimicking profiles of voters in key election states and precincts in the 2016 election, and use a mix of bots and real people to push propaganda from state-controlled media outlets like Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik.

Mandia said its tough to differentiate between bots and humans as bots become smarter, and the U.S. cant fight Russia with cyber tactics alone.

It just feels like were in a glass house throwing rocks at a mud hut, he said.

FBI Director James Comey revealed last week the FBI is investigating any possible ties between President Donald Trump and Russia.

Heres our live-blog from earlier, below.

4:03 p.m. The hearing is adjourned.

4:01 p.m. Guccifer 2.0 is definitely not just one human being, Rid said, because of the differences in writing, but he said he is confident Guccifer 2.0 is an agent of the Russian government.

3:57 p.m. Rid said Congress may be more susceptible to hacking than others, as ethics rules sometimes require members to have multiple devices, and thus, they have more to secure.

3:41 p.m.Mandia said merely fighting Russia with cyber-on-cyber warfare wont work.

It just feels like were in a glass house throwing rocks at a mud hud, he said.

3:34 p.m. West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin asked about the extent of Russias ability to meddle the 2016 election.

Could they have drastically changed the outcome of the election? Manchin said.

I have no idea, Mandia responded.

3:29 p.m.: Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford asked witnesses if mysterious hacker Guccifer 2.0 is definitely linked to Russia.

I think its remarkably consistent, Mandia said.

3:10 p.m. New Mexico Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich said members of his family and staff have also been victims of phishing attempts to sabotage their personal information.

3:07 p.m.Sen. John Cornyn, the Senate majority whip from Texas, asked Gen. Alexander how important the somewhat-controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is, given that its coming up for reauthorization in Congress. The law is controversial because it allows for physical and electronic surveillance measures.

I think thats the most important program thats out there, especially in counterterrorism, Gen. Alexander said.

2:40 p.m.Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said he will not address claims that he was the target of a Russian cyberattack, but said members of his former campaign staff were targeted both during the campaign, and as recently as Wednesday. Wednesdays attempt, which came from an IP in Russia, failed, he said.

2:31 p.m.Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the committees vice chairman, asked if any of the witnesses had any doubt that Russians interfered in the 2016 election cycle.

You cant always connect the dots, Mandia said, but added, It absolutely stretches credulity to think they were not involved.

I believe they were involved, Gen. Alexander said.

I believe they were involved as well, Rid added.

Warner next asked if it was possible for the Russians to target voters at the precinct level with a network of bots.

Possible to target precinct levels with a botnet network for specific precincts?

Alexander: I think its technically possible, Gen. Alexander said, adding he couldnt confirm how much that happened.

2:24 p.m. Russia seized an opportunity in 2016 when the U.S. was very polarized politically, said Thomas Rid, a professor at the Department of War Studies at Kings College in London.

The more polarized a society, the more vulnerable it is, Thomas Rid said.

Russian intelligence operations by 2015 began combining the tools of hacking and leaking, targeting defense and diplomatic entities, Rid said.

Russia likes to use unwitting agents, Rid said, adding that Wikileaks, Twitter and over-eager journalists contributed to Russias efforts in 2016.

2:18 p.m.Retired Gen. Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency, said the U.S. needs to determine Russias motives for interfering in elections or politics.

Whats Russia trying to do, and why are they trying to do it? he said.

Gen. Alexander said the U.S. cant shy away from or ignore Russia.

I believe we have to engage and confront, he said.

2:14p.m. Witness and cybersecurity expert Kevin Mandia said Russians began changing their rules of engagement for cyber warfare in August or September 2014. Also in 2014, a group they attributed to the Russian government began compromising organizations and leaking data, something experts hadnt seen before, he said.

It is our view that the United States is going to continue to see these things happen, Mandia said.

Mandia said the U.S. needs to know who is behind the hacking, which requires international cooperation. Only then can the U.S. determine a proportional response, he said.

2:06 p.m.Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr opens the hearing.

Read the original here:
Former NSA director says Russia was involved in 2016 election - CBS News

The nature of cyberthreats aimed at both the U.S. government and private American companies calls for a dramatic shift in how the larger cybersecurity community shares information about hackers and collectively responds to attacks, said Neal Ziring, technical director for the NSAs Capabilities Directorate.

While raising the awareness of what different hackers and foreign intelligence agencies are doing in cyberspace remains essential, Ziring said, its simply not enough based on the level of danger and activities occurring today.

The next and necessary step is the development of a shared, public-private framework in the U.S. that can roll out software patches and other system updates at machine speed to individual researchers, industry and the government as soon as new intelligence become available, according to Ziring and Thomas Donahue, director of research at the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center. They bothspoke Thursday at a cybersecurity conference in D.C.

The big thing for me is that information sharing by itself is not enough. We need to start establishing the infrastructures, the standards, the practices for shared response, Ziring said. Todays actors can be really successful because they develop this tradecraft and they get to use it over and over and over again and they advertise the investment in this tradecraft as monetizing it against lots of targets. Thats what we need to take away from them. And the only way to do that is to have a response that can be shared amongst all of us.

Zirings plan is to essentially democratize cyberthreat intelligence and make it actionable for a myriad of different U.S. partners. The market today leans on a model inwhichprivate companies acquire and sell proprietary research only to clients, keeping much of what they find accessible only to customers.

While the Homeland Security Department has helped pioneer the development of several different cyberthreat information sharing programs, a response framework like the one described by Ziring does not exist today.

With

as the new normal setting for decision making, we must improve our awareness of the infrastructure and activities of our adversaries because it is poor, our ability to respond to specific incidents is way too slow and our strategic response to that kind of behavior is at best nascent and weak, said Donahue.

At the moment, a private, nonprofit organization named the Cyber Threat Alliance, or CTA , offers perhaps the closest model to what Ziring is proposing.

The CTAs move to an incorporated entity signifies the commitment by industry leaders to work together to determine the most effective methods for sharing automated, rich threat data and to make united progress in the fight against sophisticated cyber attacks, the organizations website reads.

Founded in 2014, the CTA is exclusively comprises prominent, private sector cybersecurity firms, including Fortinet, Intel Security, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec, Check Point and Cisco, whocollectively pool threat intelligence and code-based countermeasures. Companies provide this information at-will and in good faith.

Zirings comments come nearly one month after former NSA Director Keith Alexander told senators that the U.S. government would be wise to reorganize current cybersecurity responsibilities, which are split between the FBI, Homeland Security Department, Defense Department and intelligenceagencies, into a single entity. Alexander said that this new organization would lead the efforts to develop constructive relationships with private digital security companies.

More:
NSA technical director: Sharing hacker information isn't enough, we need a shared response - CyberScoop

Authored by Chris Menahan via InformationLiberation.com,

NSA whistleblower William Binney told Tucker Carlson on Friday that the NSA is spying on "all the members of the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress, both House and Senate, as well as the White House."

Binney, who served the NSA for 30 years before blowing the whistle on domestic spying in 2001, told Tucker he firmly believes that Trump was spied on.

"They're taking in fundamentally the entire fiber network inside the United States and collecting all that data and storing it, in a program they call Stellar Wind," Binney said.

"That's the domestic collection of data on US citizens, US citizens to other US citizens," he said. "Everything we're doing, phone calls, emails and then financial transactions, credit cards, things like that, all of it."

"Inside NSA there are a set of people who are -- and we got this from another NSA whistleblower who witnessed some of this -- they're inside there, they are targeting and looking at all the members of the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress, both House and Senate, as well as the White House," Binney said.

"And all this data is inside the NSA in a small group where they're looking at it. The idea is to see what people in power over you are going to -- what they think, what they think you should be doing or planning to do to you, your budget, or whatever so you can try to counteract before it actually happens," he said.

"I mean, that's just East German," Tucker responded.

Rather than help prevent terrorist attacks, Binney said collecting so much information actually makes stopping attacks more difficult.

"This bulk acquisition is inhibiting their ability to detect terrorist threats in advance so they can't stop them so people get killed as a result," he said.

"Which means, you know, they pick up the pieces and blood after the attack. That's what's been going on. I mean they've consistently failed. When Alexander said they'd stop 54 attacks and he was challenged to produce the evidence to prove that he failed on every count."

Binney concludes ominously indicating the origin of the deep state...

"They are like the praetorian guard, they determine what the emperor does and who the emperor is..."

Who's going to stop them?

More here:
"They're Like The Praetorian Guard" - Whistleblower Confirms ...

Republicans charged Tuesday that Democrats are blocking the House Intelligence Committee's investigation into Russia from moving forward by refusing to sign a letter that would officially invite FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers back before the committee for closed-door testimony.

Republicans have made clear they want that testimony before hearing from others, and say it will allow the committee to be as informed as possible when interviewing future witnesses.

Committee member Rep. Peter King, R-NY, verified the information about the letter that was described to the Washington Examiner by a source close to the committee who requested anonymity.

"My understanding is that Devin [Nunes] or the general counsel for the Republican side prepared a letter to Director Comey and Director Rogers asking them to testify at a closed session, and that thus far, the Democrats have not signed it," King said.

"The purpose of the closed session is to start getting answers to many of the questions that Director Comey could not answer at the public hearing because of the ongoing investigation. To me, if Democrats want answers to their questions, this is one way to get them. So I'm surprised they're not agreeing to this right away," King added.

A Democratic committee aide replied by accusing Republicans of trying to eliminate the open hearing entirely.

"Republicans wanted to do the closed hearing in lieu of the open hearing they were hoping to schedule it at the exact same time as the open hearing, even though all the witnesses [Brennan, Clapper and Yates] were prepared to testify," the aide said. "We would welcome hearing from Directors Comey and Rogers again just not instead of the open hearing."

The delay in setting up the closed hearing also means that the testimony volunteered by four persons related to Trump campaign Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Roger Stone, and son-in-law Jared Kushner is on hold indefinitely, as the committee wants to have the closed session first.

Comey and Rogers have already given their open testimony to the committee. But just two days later, Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., made his bombshell revelations in which he claimed to have reviewed raw intelligence documents that allegedly show members of the Trump transition team being caught up and named in legal surveillance of foreign nationals. Nunes also briefed the White House on his findings, a move which was controversial enough at the time, but has grown even more so in recent days.

Also from the Washington Examiner

Sanders says to forget about a deal on healthcare.

03/29/17 10:41 AM

Last Friday, Nunes announced the committee was cancelling the already-planned second open hearing which would have included former National Intelligence Director James Clapper and former acting US Attorney General Sally Yates. "We are asking Mr. Comey and Mr. Rogers to come back in. And until we can get them in in a closed session, it's not going to be worth it to have the open session," he said.

Democrats blasted the decision at the time. "What's really involved here is the cancellation of this open hearing and the rest is designed to distract," said ranking member Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

Democrats said they were skeptical that Nunes' revelations might have been coordinated by the White House. That speculation intensified this week after CNN reported Nunes had been on the White House grounds to meet the source for the documents behind his claims.

Nunes explained the episode in an interview with CNN by saying his White House visit was a fairly common happening, and that the information he needed to view could only be done so at places with the correct computer security and clearances, which was available at the White House.

Numerous Democrats have called for Nunes to step away from the investigation, but thus far he has refused to do so.

Also from the Washington Examiner

"April is a tough reporter that knows how to throw it out and take it back."

03/29/17 10:28 AM

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GOP accuses Democrats of blocking closed FBI, NSA testimony on Russia - Washington Examiner

March 28, 2017

The spokesman for House Intel Chairman Devin Nunes says Tuesdays close door session with FBI Director James Comey is cancelled

(WASHINGTON, DC) The U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee will not hold on Tuesday a closed briefing with the directors of the FBI and National Security Agency, a spokesman for the committee's Republican chairman said on Monday.

Representative Devin Nunes, the committee's chairman, last week said he canceled a public hearing on the committee's investigation of Russian influence on the 2016 election because it was necessary to hold the closed session with Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers.

"Director Comey and Adm. Rogers could not come in tomorrow as wed hoped, so the Committee will continue to try to schedule a time when they can meet with us in closed session," Jack Langer, a spokesman for Nunes, said in a statement.

CNN reports that though Mr. Nunes cancelled the Tuesday close door meeting, he still plans to hold a private briefings with FBI Director James B. Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rodgers in the near future.

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Closed House intel hearing with Comey and NSA cancelled - TRUNEWS

The U.S. government has not figured out how to deter the Russians from meddling in democratic processes, and stopping their interference in elections, both here and in Europe, is a pressing problem, the top civilian leader of the National Security Agency said.

The NSA was among the intelligence agencies that concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a cyber-enabled influence campaign in 2016 aimed at undermining confidence in the election, harming Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and helping elect GOP nominee Donald Trump.

This is a challenge to the foundations of our democracy, said NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett, 58, who is retiring at the end of April, in an interview at Fort Meade, Md., the agencys headquarters. Its the sanctity of our process, of evaluating and looking at candidates, and having accurate information about the candidates. So the idea that another nation state is [interfering with that] is a pretty big deal and something we need to figure out. How do we counter that? How do we identify that its happening in real time as opposed to after the fact? And what do we do as a nation to make it stop?

The lack of answers, he said, as an American citizen ... gives me a lot of heartburn.

Ledgett, known as a straight-shooting, unflappable intelligence professional, began his NSA career in 1988 teaching cryptanalysis how to crack codes and rose to become the agencys top civilian leader . The NSA, with 35,000 civilian and military employees, gathers intelligence on foreign targets overseas through wiretaps and increasingly by cyberhacking. Its other mission is to secure the government computers that handle classified information and other data critical to military and intelligence activities.

Asked whether the NSA had any inkling that the Kremlin was going to orchestrate the release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails last July, he demurred. I actually dont want to talk about that.

At the same time, he said, what Moscow did was no strategic surprise. Rather, what may have been a tactical surprise was that they would do it the way they did.

Campaigns of propaganda and disinformation, dating back to the Soviet Union, have long been a staple of the Kremlins foreign policy. Now, however, it is making effective use of its hacking prowess to weaponize information and combine it with its influence operations, or what intelligence officials call active measures.

In general, if youre responding to nation-state actions like that, you have to find out what are the levers that will move the nation-state actors and are you able and willing to pull those levers? said Ledgett when asked how the United States should respond.

The Obama administration slapped economic sanctions on two Russian spy agencies involved in hacking the DNC, three companies believed to have provided support for government cyber operations, and four Russian cyber officials. The administration also ordered 35 Russian operatives to leave the United States and shut down Russian-owned facilities on Marylands Eastern Shore and on Long Island believed to have been used for intelligence purposes.

Yet, intelligence officials including NSA Director Michael S. Rogers and FBI Director James B. Comey said on Monday that they believe Moscow will strike again in 2020, if not in 2018.

[FBI Director Comey confirms probe of possible coordination between Kremlin and Trump campaign]

So should the government mull other options, such as hacking Russian officials emails or financial records and releasing them in a bid to embarrass or show corruption? I think every element of national power is something we should consider, he said. That would probably fall under something like a covert action. But if thats the right answer, thats the right answer.

Ledgett is probably most well known for leading the agency task force that handled the fallout from the leaks of classified information by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013. The disclosures prompted a national and global debate about the proper scope of government surveillance and led Congress to pass some reforms, including the outlawing of bulk collection of Americans phone metadata.

But the disclosures also caused great upheaval in NSAs collection efforts, hurt morale, and damaged relations with allies and with tech firms that enable court-ordered surveillance, Ledgett said. It was a terrible time for the agency, he said.

He oversaw the probe of the internal breach; relations with Congress, the White House, foreign governments and the press; and the effort to prevent a recurrence. There was a bit of a narrative on the outside about this evil agency that hoovered up all the communications in the world and rooted through them for things that were interesting, and that wasnt actually true.

The operational hit was significant, he said. More than 1,000 foreign targets whether a person or a group or an organization altered or attempted to alter their means of communications as a result of the disclosures, he said. They tried with varying degrees of success to remove themselves from our ability to see what they were doing, he said.

The agency, which has some 200 stations worldwide, reworked capabilities including virtually all of its hacking tools. In some cases, we had to do things very differently to gather the same foreign intelligence as before.

Raj De, a former NSA general counsel, said Ledgett was relied on heavily by both Rogers and Rogerss predecessor, Keith B. Alexander. He has really been a source of steadiness for the agency, said De, now head of the Cybersecurity & Data Privacy practice at Mayer Brown, a global law firm. What is particularly notable about Rick is his willingness to engage with all types of people, to keep an open mind.

In December 2013, Alexander, when he was the NSA director, said that Snowden should be given no amnesty. But Ledgett told CBSs 60 Minutes then that my personal view is yes, its worth having a conversation about.

In his interview earlier this week, however, he said what he meant was that by engaging Snowden in conversation, the agency might have been able to learn what material had not been released and where it was.

Today, he said, there is no longer any need to talk to Snowden. Hes past his usefulness to us. Snowden, who is living in Moscow under a grant of asylum, has been charged with violating the Espionage Act, and Ledgett said he should not be pardoned. Ive always been of the idea that Hey, I think he needs to face the music for what he did.

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Visit link:
US needs to stop Russian electoral interference, NSA's top civilian leader says - Washington Post

CNSNews.com (blog)

NSA Director: Decision to Unmask 'Really Important' People Can Depend on Whether He's 'Comfortable' CNSNews.com (blog) If the person mentioned in an investigation is really important, officials will check with him to make sure he's comfortable before making that person's name public, National Security Agency (NSA) Director Mike Rogers testified in a House hearing Monday.

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NSA Director: Decision to Unmask 'Really Important' People Can Depend on Whether He's 'Comfortable' - CNSNews.com (blog)