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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: Wanted: Competent Big Brothers As the Senate frets over whether the NSA has violated the outdated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, no one is paying attention to the real issue: proficiency. Newsweek Updated: 2:58 p.m. ET Feb. 8, 2006 Feb. 8, 2006 - Sen. Joseph Biden was uncharacteristically succinct. "How will we know when this war is over?" Biden asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Monday at a Senate hearing on the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program. Biden never really got a good answer, but his question still resonates. The Bush administration calls the war on terror "the long war." But if we are to take the president and his aides at their word, it is more like a permanent war, one that by definition can never end. Having identified the enemy as Al Qaeda and its "affiliates"—at a time when angry young Muslims are boiling up all over, to be recruited by terror cells yet unborn—the administration surely knows it will be a long, long time until all the Islamist bad guys are eliminated. And that means the extraordinary powers that George W. Bush has arrogated to himself "during wartime"—including the surveillance of Americans—could become permanent as well. It all sounds frighteningly Orwellian. But the truth is that, for all the hue and cry over American civil liberties, we are a long way from Big Brother today. In fact, we could probably use a little more Big Brother about now. After four and a half years, our intelligence and national-security apparatus still hasn’t learned how to track terrorists, and the Bush administration has put forward little more than cosmetic reforms. The legal controversy over the NSA surveillance program has obscured an intelligence issue that is at least as important to the nation’s future: sheer competence. Do we have any idea what we’re doing? One reason the NSA is listening in on so many domestic conversations fruitlessly—few of the thousands of tips panned out, according to The Washington Post—is that the agency barely has a clue as to who, or what, it is supposed to be monitoring. While soaking up the lion’s share of the $40 billion annual intel budget, the NSA continues to preside over an antiquated cold-war apparatus, one designed to listen in on official communications pipelines in nation-states. Today it is overwhelmed by cell-phone and Internet traffic. While terror groups multiply, the NSA is still waiting for the next Soviet Union to arise (which many in the Pentagon see as China, say, 50 to 100 years from now). As a December 2002 report by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee noted, "Only a tiny fraction" of the NSA’s 650 million daily intercepts worldwide "are actually ever reviewed by humans, and much of what is collected gets lost in the deluge of data." What’s needed is a fundamental rethinking that would put some of those billions of dollars that go into NSA’s global surveillance into more human intelligence and Internet surveillance instead. But that’s not happening. "There’s no question that technology changes have created a tidal-wave type of problem," says one former senior NSA official. "NSA’s been talking about it for 10 years at least. Will they ever get in front of it? No." As our esteemed senators fret over whether the NSA has violated their outdated 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, they are not paying enough attention to the competence issue. And no one seems to recall that the same Senate intelligence committee report from 2002 also criticized the "NSA's cautious approach to any collection of intelligence relating to activities in the United States," and its "failure to address modern communications technology aggressively." In recent years the agency tried to do so, but failed. To little notice, a giant $1 billion-plus program called Trailblazer that was to have brought the NSA up to date in data mining and pattern analysis—transforming the NSA's blizzard of signals intelligence into an easily searchable database—has turned into such a boondoggle that, one intelligence official says, "nothing can be salvaged out of it." "It’s a complete and abject failure," says Robert D. Steele, a CIA veteran who is familiar with the program. What went wrong? The NSA, using traditional defense contractors like Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), sought to do too much at once, applying a clunky top-down solution to what was a Silicon Valley problem, says Ed Giorgio, who was the chief codebreaker at NSA for 30 years. "The biggest problem with Trailblazer was there was a grand theory of unification that was going to solve the problem, as if the ‘central committee’ could really do what’s best done by a distributed network of people," he says. Adds Fred Cohen, a former computer scientist at Sandia Labs: "The scope and magnitude of this problem is enormous. What they have failed at historically and are failing to do today is to put out enough small money to enough different creative thinkers to explore a lot more possibilities." By most accounts, no one at senior levels has a good idea of how to replace the failed Trailblazer. Now, time’s awasting. Former NSA senior director Philip Bobbitt, writing recently in The New York Times, provided a vivid example of the importance of data mining and pattern analysis. On Sept. 10, 2001, he wrote, the NSA intercepted two messages: ''The match begins tomorrow'' and ''Tomorrow is zero hour.'' They were picked up from random monitoring of pay phones in areas of Afghanistan where Al Qaeda was active. No one knew what to make of them, and in any case they were not translated or disseminated until Sept. 12. But "had we at the time cross-referenced credit card accounts, frequent-flyer programs and a cellphone number shared by those two men, data mining might easily have picked up on the 17 other men linked to them and flying on the same day at the same time on four flights," Bobbitt wrote. Today the NSA seems hardly more capable of piecing together the next "tomorrow is zero hour" intercept. Is anything going right with intelligence reform? Of course: you can’t throw a half a trillion dollars at a problem—as the administration is doing with its latest defense and security budget—without some of it sticking successfully. Vice President Dick Cheney asserted recently that the NSA’s domestic surveillance program has "saved thousands of lives." The only domestic success that administration has publicly linked to the surveillance program is the exposure of a rather comical plan by truck driver Iyman Faris to blowtorch the Brooklyn Bridge (even that claim is questionable). A U.S. official privy to the intelligence tells NEWSWEEK that another attack on a U.S. urban area was averted as well. The administration won’t discuss this averted plot, however, because to do so would reveal secret NSA listening methods. Ironically, one of the most hopeful new intelligence surveillance programs is one that is still demonized in the media and on Capitol Hill. This is the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, which was canceled after the last big civil-liberties scandal in late 2002. TIA was the creation of Adm. John Poindexter, the Iran-contra figure who was brought in to run the new program but was cashiered after it was uncovered by The New York Times. TIA was an effort to vacuum up as much U.S. transactions information as possible, such as the purchase of plane tickets or, say, large amounts of fertilizer as a way of anticipating terror plots. But the program was dropped after several senators blasted some of Poindexter’s odder suggestions, like creating a "futures market" in which terror experts could bet on likely terror events and thereby add to the government’s knowledge base. Yet today, very quietly, the core of TIA survives with a new codename of Topsail (minus the futures market), two officials privy to the intelligence tell NEWSWEEK. It is in programs like these that real data mining is going on and—considering the furor over TIA—with fewer intrusions on civil liberties than occur under the NSA surveillance program. "It’s the best thing to come out of American intelligence in decades," says John Arquilla, an intelligence expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "It is truly Poindexter’s brainchild. Of all the people in the intelligence business, he has the keenest appreciation of using advanced information technology for intelligence gathering." Poindexter, who lives just outside Washington in Rockville, Md., could not be reached for comment on whether he is still involved with Topsail. One indication of how superficial intelligence reform has been is that when the nation’s top spy, John Negroponte, was asked whether he was aware of TIA’s successor at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in late January, he seemed completely stumped. "I don’t know the answer," replied Negroponte, who is supposed to be coordinating intel transformation as the new national director of intelligence. FBI Director Robert Mueller also said he had "no knowledge" of the program. (Negroponte’s deputy, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former NSA director who’s been involved in intel far longer, seemed to indirectly confirm Topsail’s existence when he said he would respond "in closed session.") Why isn’t a more fundamental rethinking going on? Here we arrive at the real issue. Giorgio, the former NSA codebreaker, says that the problem of tracking terrorists needs to be rethought from the ground up "in small bits." The government needs to bring in the best and brightest entrepreneurs (interestingly, Poindexter’s seemingly wacky futures market might have done something like this). And the vested interests of America’s various cold-war-era agencies, and their traditional big contractors, are preventing this from happening. The late, great economist Mancur Olson once described how the accumulation of vested interest groups and bureaucracies in free societies causes a kind of sclerosis in the system over many decades. This is precisely what is holding up intelligence reform today, and Olson, who died in 1998 at a time he was seen as a future Nobel laureate, would no doubt recognize the phenomenon. Some observers have noted that in World War II and the early cold war, America built the intelligence apparatus it needed to win from scratch. Why did it seem so easier then than today? they ask. In part because on the eve of World War II, the U.S. government bureaucracy was tiny, especially the military (the Interior Department was bigger than the War Department, believe it or not). Today, by contrast, every intelligence agency is a glandular monstrosity left over from a half century of world war and cold war. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other agencies spend most of their energy defending their own turf, rather than American turf. "The bottom line here is entire system has been built up incrementally over 50 years as part of what Eisenhower warned about, the military-industrial complex," says Steele. "The system is on automatic pilot." Ed Giorgio agrees. "There are sacred cows, enormously expensive endeavors costing billions year, being done in space and elsewhere," says Giorgio. "You’re not going to find a terrorist by looking for one in space." Only one person has the power to slice through the bureaucratic inertia and set real reform in motion: the president of the United States. But to do so, of course, could put the permanent war in jeopardy. And if you’re a "war president," as Bush describes himself, and you want to reassert presidential power, as he does, then permanent war can be a good thing. Perhaps that is why Karl Rove, with his war-works-for-the-GOP campaign strategy for 2006, looks so happy these days. Perhaps it is why the president—who once dismissed Osama bin Laden as unimportant as he diverted the nation’s attention and resources to Iraq—now says that Americans should take the mastermind of 9/11 "seriously." (Wasn’t it just Groundhog Day recently?) Perhaps it is why the Bush administration is now devoting so much to its military buildup while stripping critical education programs needed to make America more competitive, insisting on permanent tax cuts and ensuring monster deficits for decades. Wait a minute. Drawing the lone superpower into an endless global struggle, draining it of its wealth and will … that was Osama bin Laden’s strategic goal, right? Didn’t we have some intelligence on that once?
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