NSA debate takes new turns after Paris attacks

Privacy advocates are pushing back against arguments from the intelligence community that more surveillance powers would have prevented the deadly Paris terrorist attacks.

They’re offended at what they see as naked opportunism from supporters of tough surveillance powers and argue the rhetoric — including suggestions that National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has blood on his hands — has gone too far.

{mosads}“Unfortunately, it’s somewhat par for the course,” said Evan Greer, campaign director for the digital rights activist group Fight for the Future.

“Any time these types of attacks happen, it’s a disturbing but expected moment that politicians will seize that opportunity to push for policies they’ve wanted for ages, regardless of whether they think it would actually have helped in that situation,” she said.

The fight over whether Americans must trade security for privacy is playing out in two debates: one over encrypted data and another over the National Security Agency’s  (NSA) surveillance programs.

In the wake of the attacks, which left 130 people dead, law enforcement and intelligence officials, as well as lawmakers, revived arguments that tech companies have stonewalled needed investigations by refusing to provide some form of guaranteed access, or “back door,” to encrypted devices.

Some suggested that such access could have prevented the attacks, which were planned virtually under the noses of Belgian and French authorities.

“I think there’s strong indicators that they did [use encryption],” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Yet no evidence has been made public demonstrating the use of encryption by the attackers, and preliminary reports show that at least some of the terrorists weren’t communicating through encrypted channels.

A phone found in a trash can near the concert hall contained an unencrypted text message sent shortly after the first gunman entered the venue reading, “Let’s go, we’re starting.”

“People were totally off base with the claims they were making about encryption,” Greer said.

Security experts — including Apple CEO Tim Cook — have consistently argued that weakening encryption by providing guaranteed access undermines overall Web security.

Other researchers say that even if law enforcement had the access it’s demanding, it still would not have prevented the attacks.

“Having a backdoor into encryption for police or spy agencies generally only matters if investigators have identified their targets but can’t read their communications,” Jason Healey, a former director of cyber infrastructure protection at the White House, wrote in a recent op-ed. “That wasn’t the case prior to the Paris attacks.”

The fight against back doors is where Fight for the Future will be directing its attention in the coming months, Greer says.

“We need real answers and solutions, not politicians scrambling to spin this terrible situation to grab more power,” the group said in a blog post immediately following the attack.

Supporters of surveillance point to changing terrorist behavior in the wake of Snowden’s revelations as evidence that his actions, and steps to roll back those programs, have hurt the counterterrorism effort.

“We saw people that we were targeting with NSA surveillance … go to different service providers,” Matthew Olsen, who until last year served as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said at a Yahoo News conference the day before the Paris attacks. “We saw them go to uses of encryption. They’re reading the newspapers and seeing what we can do.”  

President Obama earlier this year signed the USA Freedom Act, which discontinued the bulk collection of Americans’ phone call metadata.

Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), a GOP presidential candidate, threw his weight behind legislation from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that would have allowed the NSA programs to continue until 2017.

The Freedom Act “left our intelligence community with fewer tools to protect the American people and needlessly created more vulnerabilities and gaps in information-gathering used to prevent terrorist attacks at home and abroad,” Rubio said.

Whether the NSA programs have helped identify terrorist plots is a hotly disputed point.

Intelligence officials have insisted that the collection of metadata has contributed to stopping at least 12 potential attacks.

But a 2014 study by the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found that the bulk collection of ph one call data did not help identify either terrorist plots or individual terrorists.

The report, conducted by board members with top-secret clearance who reviewed classified documents, found that in “only one instance over the past seven years has the program arguably contributed to the identification of an unknown terrorism suspect,” and that in that case, “there is reason to believe that the FBI may have discovered him without the contribution of the NSA’s program.”

“We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation,” the report reads.

Board Chairman David Medine notes that the intelligence community did not disagree with the agency’s fact-finding, although it disputed its conclusion that the program was illegal.

“We gave our factual write-up to the intelligence community to check that we got the facts right,” he told The Hill. “Other than some minor changes, they concurred with our factual analysis.”

Medine says the choice between liberty and security is a false one.

“We shouldn’t be swayed by individual events and lose sight of the big picture, which is that we both need to protect national security and civil liberties,” Medine said. “I think we will hopefully try to avoid the pendulum swing where we go from one extreme to the other.”