Syria Job Upends Quiet Routine At Chemical Disarmament Agency

Washington Post
September 29, 2013
Pg. 19

 

By Michael Birnbaum

THE HAGUE — The phone calls have been overwhelming and the late nights unusual at a quiet organization charged with an unprecedented task: disarming Syria of its chemical weapons in the middle of a civil war.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons will send a team of inspectors to Damascus on Monday, and its success or failure could shape whether the United States and its partners push once again to intervene militarily in Syria. The tiny organization, which just six weeks ago was accustomed to calmer work overseeing the destruction of Cold War-era stockpiles of American and Russian weaponry, has had to shift to war footing as it prepares to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons in a matter of months.
Among the questions that remain are whether the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has fully declared its stockpile; whether the inspectors will be secure in dangerous territory where control is fluid; and whether the team can meet ambitious timetables, approved Saturday, under which it must destroy Syria’s capability to produce chemical weapons by Nov. 1 and eliminate all chemical and munitions stockpiles by July 1. Such efforts usually take years.
Critics say that the agency’s consensus-driven approach to resolving conflicts about disclosures may move too slowly for a fast-moving situation and that it has little experience doing detective work when weapons are hidden.
But officials at the 16-year-old agency, housed in a building in The Hague that looks like a round of Edam cheese missing a wedge, say they are up for the challenge.
“People are still getting their heads around being in the global limelight,” said Michael Luhan, the OPCW’s sole spokesman, who juggled three phones for hours on a recent day as hundreds of journalists called to ask for details about Syria’s surprise enumeration of its chemical weaponry. “If this is not an example of building a plane and flying it at the same time, I don’t know what is.”
Not a 24-7 organization
The OPCW is tasked with implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention, which took effect in 1997 and requires the elimination of all chemical weapons by the 189 states — 190 including Syria — that are party to the agreement. That work has taken inspectors to unstable countries such as Libya and Iraq.
Most of the efforts, however, have been devoted to overseeing the slow, methodical destruction of vast stores of American and Russian weaponry, along with inspecting chemical plants around the world to ensure that they are not being used to produce new weapons. Improvising under live fire typically has not been the agency’s task. Most plans are made a year in advance.
“It’s kind of a 9-to-5 organization, in a way. It’s not a 24-7 organization, and it’s going to have to adapt to that,” said Faiza Patel, a former senior policy officer at the OPCW. “The organization is not really set up to be an investigative organization,” unlike the U.N. investigators who were sent to Iraq in the 1990s, she said. “It’s set up to do routine inspections that are based on the declarations that the states provide.”
A ‘body of nerdish people’
But analysts praise the agency’s technical capabilities and expertise. OPCW officials were part of the U.N. inspection team that was in Damascus on Aug. 21 when a chemical weapons attack took place on the city’s outskirts. They visited the site five days later — coming under fire along the way — and interviewed survivors and took samples and weapons measurements, all under a tight deadline. Then they produced a report in three weeks.
“It’s this body of nerdish people who go out in gumboots and collect chemical samples, and go into factories and oversee the destruction of chemical weapons,” said Patricia Lewis, research director for international security at Chatham House in London and former director of the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research. “They were in this backwater of The Hague, and they were getting along quietly, fulfilling their mandate.”
She added: “They’re very good. They’re very professional.”
Now the organization, which has long operated in the shadow of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, is looking to bulk up quickly. It has 125 inspectors on staff and plans to call retirees back into service as it establishes a presence in Syria. The Syrian delegation will come from existing ranks for now, officials said, but the resolution passed Saturday by the OPCW’s executive council calls for the agency’s expansion. Its budget this year is $95 million, paid by member countries.
Officials were preparing Saturday for a multi-ton airlift of equipment and personnel — about 20 inspectors and support staff — according to an OPCW official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive logistics. Supplies and employees are scheduled to land in Damascus on Monday, and inspectors are to start work Tuesday. Site inspections will begin in about a week.
Means of destruction
The inspectors’ first task will be to check the sites and munitions against the Syrian government’s declaration, the official said. Other staff members will set up a headquarters in Damascus. The inspectors will then oversee the rapid destruction of equipment used to produce chemical weapons, something analysts said could be done with sledgehammers, buzz saws and bulldozers.
Destruction of chemical materiel will take longer and is more complicated, especially in the middle of a war, officials said. The job will be easier than it could have been because much of the chemical materiel is not in weaponized form, U.S. and OPCW officials have said.
One method is to incinerate the chemicals, analysts said. Another is to use hydrolysis to render the chemicals less dangerous. The fastest method would be to remove the stores from Syria and destroy them at a slower pace, but moving chemical weapons across state borders is banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention.
“The convention was never written for the environment that we find ourselves in,” the OPCW official said.
“At this stage, there are clearly things that we’d like to do that we can’t,” the official added. “But nothing is off the table, apart from things like just dumping it in the ground.”

Israel And Others In Mideast View Overtures Of U.S. And Iran With Suspicion

New York Times
September 29, 2013
Pg. 14

 

By Jodi Rudoren

JERUSALEM — For Israel and Persian Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, President Obama’s telephone call with President Hassan Rouhani of Iran on Friday was the geopolitical equivalent of discovering your best friend flirting with your main rival.
Though few nations have a greater interest in Mr. Obama’s promise to stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, his overtures to Mr. Rouhani were greeted with alarm here and in other Middle East capitals allied with the United States. They worry about Iran’s sincerity, and fear that Mr. Obama’s desire for a diplomatic deal will only buy Iran time to continue a march toward building a nuclear weapon.
But beyond that, the prospect of even a nonnuclear Iran — strengthened economically by the lifting of sanctions, and emboldened politically by renewed relations with Washington — is seen as a dire threat that could upend the dynamics in this volatile region.
One gulf academic, in a Twitter post, likened the phone call to “the fall of the Berlin Wall.” An Israeli lawmaker said in a radio interview that he hoped that Mr. Obama would not be the next Neville Chamberlain, known for appeasement of the Nazis in 1938.
“There is a lot of suspicion and even paranoia about some secret deal between Iran and America,” said Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist who is close to the royal family. “My concern is that the Americans will accept Iran as it is — so that the Iranians can continue their old policies of expansionism and aggression.”
Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni-dominated gulf countries share a concern about a shift in the balance of power toward Iran’s Shiite-led government and its allies. For Israel, Iran remains the sponsor of global terrorism and of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, both avowed enemies of Israel’s existence.
“They can change the regime, but one thing won’t change and that is the hostility against Israel,” warned Uzi Rabi, chairman of a Middle East studies center at Tel Aviv University. “Part of the plan is to drive a wedge between Americans and Europeans and Israel. I hate to say it, but what the Iranians managed to do is to change the whole game.”
There was no official reaction on Saturday from Riyadh or Jerusalem to the telephone call, which was the first direct conversation between American and Iranian presidents in more than three decades. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spent the day rewriting the speech he is scheduled to deliver Tuesday at the United Nations and preparing for a meeting on Monday with Mr. Obama. After years in which Mr. Netanyahu exploited Iran’s nuclear ambitions to rally the world against Iran and force its isolation, Israel could find itself increasingly isolated in its hard-line stance.
“Netanyahu understands that there is a lot of euphoria,” a senior Israeli official said. “Netanyahu knows that people in the international community will want to believe. I think you’ll see in his remarks a lot of facts, a lot of facts that no one denies.”
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to do otherwise, and Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, declined to discuss the phone call. “The main thing is not procedures but substance,” said Mr. Steinitz, who led Israel’s delegation in a boycott of Mr. Rouhani’s United Nations speech.
“The most critical problem with Iran is its aim of achieving nuclear weapons, but the problem with Iran is wider,” Mr. Steinitz added. “Iran is not a peace-seeking country or regime — on the contrary. Iran is maybe the most aggressive country in the world, and it’s not just against Israel.”
Saudi Arabia and other gulf states view Iran as a regional nemesis whose nuclear program is only one element of a broader effort to project power. The rivalry is made more bitter by the sectarian dimension and competition over supplying oil to the world. The Saudi leadership has long been uneasy with Mr. Obama’s handling of the Arab uprisings that began in 2011, which it sees as a threat to the regional order. The president’s overtures to Iran add to a growing impatience and exasperation among Arabs in the gulf over Washington’s retreat from threats to strike Syria, whose civil war is viewed as a proxy for the larger sectarian and strategic battle unfolding across the region.
“The gulf states, and the Iranians, still see this as a balance-of-power struggle,” said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center. “And Obama’s warning and Rouhani’s charm offensive, as well as what they would see as a hoodwinking of the United States on the nuclear issue, could have far-reaching consequences on the balance-of-power struggle.”
Mustafa Alani, a Dubai-based security analyst, said the Saudis think Mr. Obama is “not a reliable ally, that he’s bending to the Syrians and Iranians.” Mishaal al-Gergawi, a political analyst based in the United Arab Emirates, said, “There is a lot of cynicism, and it feeds into the notion that Obama is very naïve — he was naïve with the Muslim Brotherhood, naïve with Bashar al-Assad, and he is now naïve with Iran.”
Israeli analysts, too, worry over what they see as the Obama administration’s weak and wavering policies toward the Middle East. After the Syria chemical weapons crisis, some said the phone call only upped the ante for a diplomatic victory that could lead Washington to accept what Jerusalem would consider a “bad deal” with Iran, which insists its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only.
“Obama is interested in showing foreign policy success because he hasn’t had too many of them,” said Emily Landau, an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “I’m afraid that for the sake of that he might be willing to compromise on the nuclear issue in a manner that I think is detrimental to U.S. national security interests, leave aside Israel.”
Ms. Landau was one of several Israeli analysts who urged the world to focus not on Mr. Rouhani’s statements in New York but the continued nuclear activity in Iran. She pointed to a Sept. 12 letter that Iran sent the International Atomic Energy Agency with 20 pages of complaints about its investigation as a sign that nothing had changed. She and others also noted that Mr. Rouhani was Iran’s nuclear negotiator in a 2003 deal that it later violated; several Iran experts have seized on a speech he gave then emphasizing the importance of enrichment ability for weapons-grade uranium as political leverage.
Mr. Rouhani “confirmed the assessment that Iran had used the calm atmosphere of negotiations as a smokescreen behind which it continued to deliberately advance its nuclear program,” wrote Chen Kane, a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington. The speech reinforced the view that Iran’s “main objective in negotiating” she said, “was simply to gain time.”
The skeptics’ main concern now is that four to six months of negotiations would allow Iran to get to the breakout point for developing a bomb. “It’s not just that forever we go on with an Iranian nuclear program that never reaches conclusion, it’s that diplomacy can be a way of helping it get to the finishing line,” cautioned Jonathan Spyer of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. “The last week of diplomacy in New York has really created the impression that a very, very different understanding of what’s going on here, and what is potentially on the table, exists between the U.S. administration and the Israel government.”
Yoel Guzansky, who handled the Iranian nuclear file for the Israeli prime minister’s security council from 2005 to 2009, said the new momentum for nuclear talks with Iran had “sidelined” Israel as “a potential spoiler.”
“You can’t do anything while Iran and the U.S. are talking, you’ll just be someone who is destroying the last chance for peace,” said Mr. Guzansky. “If there is a change of tone in Iran and Washington, Israel should also change the tone. If there is a deal we embrace it, we support it, but show us the details.”
David K. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Cairo, Robert F. Worth from Washington, and Ben Hubbard from Beirut, Lebanon.

Iran To Manufacture Shahed 129 Drone

Jerusalem Post
September 29, 2013
Pg. 2

 

By Jerusalem Post staff

Iran announced on Friday it will start mass producing a new unmanned drone with missile and bombing capabilities, Iranian press reported.
According to Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Mohammad Ali Jafari, the Shahed 129 “can hit and destroy targets from a far distance with its Sadid [Iron Strong] missiles.”
It can carry eight such Sadid missiles at the same time, and hit both stationary and mobile targets up to 1,700 km. away, according to reports on Iran’s Press TV.
The unmanned aerial vehicle can fly for 24 hours and is designed for both reconnaissance and combat missions, Jafari said in September 2012, when the drone was first unveiled.
The drone, Press TV reported, has monitoring capabilities of a 200-km. radius.

Iraq Violence Spawns Desperate Security Measures

Los Angeles Times
September 29, 2013
Pg. 5

 

Authorities are razing soccer fields, banning cars and even building a moat in a bid to thwart bombers.

By Sameer N. Yacoub, Associated Press

Iraqi authorities are resorting to desperate measures to quell rising violence, ordering huge numbers of cars off the roads, bulldozing soccer fields and even building a medieval-style moat around one city in an effort to keep car bombs out.
Many Iraqis question the security benefits of the heavy-handed efforts, lampooning them online and complaining that they only add to the daily struggle of living in a country weathering its worst bout of bloodshed in half a decade.
Earlier this month, authorities began banning several hundred thousand vehicles from Baghdad streets each day in a bid to stop car bombings. Cars with license plates ending in odd numbers are allowed on the streets one day, followed by cars with even-numbered plates the next. Government cars, taxis, trucks and a few other categories of vehicles are exempted from the policy.
"Easing the traffic load on checkpoints will make it easier for security forces to search vehicles without causing long lines," an Interior Ministry official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media. Big backlogs of cars, he said, "put pressure on the security forces to do hasty searches."
Deadly violence, much of it from car bombs, has soared in recent months as insurgents capitalize on rising sectarian and ethnic tension. The scale of the bloodshed has reached levels not seen since 2008. More than 4,000 people have been killed over the last five months alone, according to United Nations figures.
Still, many Iraqis think the license plate policy is a step too far.
"Our genius security officials have turned license plates into the sole solution for all of Baghdad's security problems," said Haider Muhsin, a government employee and father of three. He fears he'll lose out on a good chunk of the $400 in cash he earned on the side each month by shuttling colleagues to work, and won't be able to take his children to school on certain days.
Another Baghdad resident, Qais Issa, now has to pay for a taxi on days he can't drive.
"Once again, the leaders of this country are failing. They keep coming up with primitive and useless solutions that add more problems to our life," he said.
The new policy has become a hot topic among Iraqis on social media sites like Facebook.
Many posts ridiculed the decision, with some joking that the government will next allow people to go out only according to the first letter in their names. Underneath a photo showing Britain's Queen Elizabeth II getting off a bus, someone quipped that her plate number must end in an even number on an odd-number day.
The Sharqiya television channel, known for its antigovernment stance, has launched what it's calling the "Pedal It" initiative, offering more than 2,000 bicycles to Baghdad residents hurt by the license plate limits.
In June, authorities in Baghdad temporarily banned all cars with temporary black license plates. Those cars made up a large percentage of older vehicles on the roads, but their ownership history is difficult to trace, and authorities feared they were more likely to be used in car bombings. Now only black-plated cars from outside Baghdad are banned.
Earlier this year, authorities ordered the closure of Iraq's border crossing with Jordan, plugging up one of the country's economic lifelines. Officials cited unspecified security concerns, but many residents in the western, Sunni-dominated Anbar province where the crossing is located saw the move as collective punishment for antigovernment protests.
In the volatile province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, the local government recently launched a campaign to bulldoze several soccer fields after a series of deadly bombings during games killed or wounded dozens of spectators.
The head of the local soccer federation, Salah Kamal, said more than 20 fields have been razed, causing the cancellation of several matches and angering young people who have few options for leisure activities.
"The solution should have been providing better security at the fields instead of punishing the youth," he said. Police turned down earlier requests for extra protection, he added.
Authorities in the province have also urged residents to avoid holding large funerals after a series of deadly attacks on mourners.
And north of the capital, authorities have completed more than 70% of a medieval-style dry moat around much of the city of Kirkuk, home to an ethnic mix of Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen who all have competing claims to the oil-rich area.
The 35-mile-long trench will surround much of the city, according to Rakan Jubouri, the deputy Kirkuk governor.
Jubouri said the project would be finished by the end of the year at a cost of $2.7 million, and will significantly improve the security of the city by keeping many car bombs out.
But many Arab and Turkmen residents fear the real goal is to tie Kirkuk more closely to Kurdish regions to the north. The Kurds want to incorporate Kirkuk into their self-ruled northern region. The city is hit frequently by attacks on mosques, commercial streets and security forces.

U.S. Concerned About Turkey's Choice Of Chinese Missile System

Reuters.com
September 28, 2013

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States said on Saturday it had expressed serious concerns to Turkey over its decision to co-produce a long-range air and missile defense system with a Chinese firm under U.S. sanctions.
Turkey, a member of the NATO military alliance, announced this week that it had chosen the FD-2000 missile defense system from China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corp, or CPMIEC, over rival systems from Russian, U.S. and European firms.
CPMIEC is under U.S. sanctions for violations of the Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Act.
"We have conveyed our serious concerns about the Turkish government's contract discussions with a U.S.-sanctioned company for a missile defense system that will not be inter-operable with NATO systems or collective defense capabilities," a State Department spokeswoman said.
"Our discussions on this issue will continue."
Some Western defense analysts have said they were surprised by Turkey's decision, having expected the contract to go to Raytheon Co, a U.S. company that builds the Patriot missile, or the Franco/Italian Eurosam SAMP/T.
The United States, Germany and the Netherlands each sent two Patriot batteries and up to 400 soldiers to operate them to southeastern Turkey early this year after Ankara asked NATO for help with air defenses against possible missile attack from Syria.
Turkey has long been the United States' closest ally in the Middle Eastern region, bordering on the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The U.S. military exercised great influence over a Turkish military that had a strong hand in Turkey's politics.
Under Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, elected in 2002, the role of the Turkish military in politics has been curbed. Political and military relations between Ankara and Washington, while still close, play a less central role and that could be reflected in procurement policy.

N.S.A. Gathers Data On Social Connections Of U.S. Citizens

New York Times
September 29, 2013
Pg. 1

 

By James Risen and Laura Poitras

WASHINGTON — Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.
The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.
The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.
The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.
N.S.A. officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing. The documents do not describe what has resulted from the scrutiny, which links phone numbers and e-mails in a “contact chain” tied directly or indirectly to a person or organization overseas that is of foreign intelligence interest.
The new disclosures add to the growing body of knowledge in recent months about the N.S.A.’s access to and use of private information concerning Americans, prompting lawmakers in Washington to call for reining in the agency and President Obama to order an examination of its surveillance policies. Almost everything about the agency’s operations is hidden, and the decision to revise the limits concerning Americans was made in secret, without review by the nation’s intelligence court or any public debate. As far back as 2006, a Justice Department memo warned of the potential for the “misuse” of such information without adequate safeguards.
An agency spokeswoman, asked about the analyses of Americans’ data, said, “All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period.”
“All of N.S.A.’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose,” the spokeswoman added. “Our activities are centered on counterterrorism, counterproliferation and cybersecurity.”
The legal underpinning of the policy change, she said, was a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that Americans could have no expectation of privacy about what numbers they had called. Based on that ruling, the Justice Department and the Pentagon decided that it was permissible to create contact chains using Americans’ “metadata,” which includes the timing, location and other details of calls and e-mails, but not their content. The agency is not required to seek warrants for the analyses from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
N.S.A. officials declined to identify which phone and e-mail databases are used to create the social network diagrams, and the documents provided by Mr. Snowden do not specify them. The agency did say that the large database of Americans’ domestic phone call records, which was revealed by Mr. Snowden in June and caused bipartisan alarm in Washington, was excluded. (N.S.A. officials have previously acknowledged that the agency has done limited analysis in that database, collected under provisions of the Patriot Act, exclusively for people who might be linked to terrorism suspects.)
But the agency has multiple collection programs and databases, the former officials said, adding that the social networking analyses relied on both domestic and international metadata. They spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the information was classified.
The concerns in the United States since Mr. Snowden’s revelations have largely focused on the scope of the agency’s collection of the private data of Americans and the potential for abuse. But the new documents provide a rare window into what the N.S.A. actually does with the information it gathers.
A series of agency PowerPoint presentations and memos describe how the N.S.A. has been able to develop software and other tools — one document cited a new generation of programs that “revolutionize” data collection and analysis — to unlock as many secrets about individuals as possible.
The spy agency, led by Gen. Keith B. Alexander, an unabashed advocate for more weapons in the hunt for information about the nation’s adversaries, clearly views its collections of metadata as one of its most powerful resources. N.S.A. analysts can exploit that information to develop a portrait of an individual, one that is perhaps more complete and predictive of behavior than could be obtained by listening to phone conversations or reading e-mails, experts say.
Phone and e-mail logs, for example, allow analysts to identify people’s friends and associates, detect where they were at a certain time, acquire clues to religious or political affiliations, and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a fellow plotter.
“Metadata can be very revealing,” said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. “Knowing things like the number someone just dialed or the location of the person’s cellphone is going to allow them to assemble a picture of what someone is up to. It’s the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.”
The N.S.A. had been pushing for more than a decade to obtain the rule change allowing the analysis of Americans’ phone and e-mail data. Intelligence officials had been frustrated that they had to stop when a contact chain hit a telephone number or e-mail address believed to be used by an American, even though it might yield valuable intelligence primarily concerning a foreigner who was overseas, according to documents previously disclosed by Mr. Snowden. N.S.A. officials also wanted to employ the agency’s advanced computer analysis tools to sift through its huge databases with much greater efficiency.
The agency had asked for the new power as early as 1999, the documents show, but had been initially rebuffed because it was not permitted under rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that were intended to protect the privacy of Americans.
A 2009 draft of an N.S.A. inspector general’s report suggests that contact chaining and analysis may have been done on Americans’ communications data under the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants, which began after the Sept. 11 attacks to detect terrorist activities and skirted the existing laws governing electronic surveillance.
In 2006, months after the wiretapping program was disclosed by The New York Times, the N.S.A.’s acting general counsel wrote a letter to a senior Justice Department official, which was also leaked by Mr. Snowden, formally asking for permission to perform the analysis on American phone and e-mail data. A Justice Department memo to the attorney general noted that the “misuse” of such information “could raise serious concerns,” and said the N.S.A. promised to impose safeguards, including regular audits, on the metadata program. In 2008, the Bush administration gave its approval.
A new policy that year, detailed in “Defense Supplemental Procedures Governing Communications Metadata Analysis,” authorized by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, said that since the Supreme Court had ruled that metadata was not constitutionally protected, N.S.A. analysts could use such information “without regard to the nationality or location of the communicants,” according to an internal N.S.A. description of the policy.
After that decision, which was previously reported by The Guardian, the N.S.A. performed the social network graphing in a pilot project for 1 ½ years “to great benefit,” according to the 2011 memo. It was put in place in November 2010 in “Sigint Management Directive 424” (sigint refers to signals intelligence).
In the 2011 memo explaining the shift, N.S.A. analysts were told that they could trace the contacts of Americans as long as they cited a foreign intelligence justification. That could include anything from ties to terrorism, weapons proliferation or international drug smuggling to spying on conversations of foreign politicians, business figures or activists.
Analysts were warned to follow existing “minimization rules,” which prohibit the N.S.A. from sharing with other agencies names and other details of Americans whose communications are collected, unless they are necessary to understand foreign intelligence reports or there is evidence of a crime. The agency is required to obtain a warrant from the intelligence court to target a “U.S. person” — a citizen or legal resident — for actual eavesdropping.
The N.S.A. documents show that one of the main tools used for chaining phone numbers and e-mail addresses has the code name Mainway. It is a repository into which vast amounts of data flow daily from the agency’s fiber-optic cables, corporate partners and foreign computer networks that have been hacked.
The documents show that significant amounts of information from the United States go into Mainway. An internal N.S.A. bulletin, for example, noted that in 2011 Mainway was taking in 700 million phone records per day. In August 2011, it began receiving an additional 1.1 billion cellphone records daily from an unnamed American service provider under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which allows for the collection of the data of Americans if at least one end of the communication is believed to be foreign.
The overall volume of metadata collected by the N.S.A. is reflected in the agency’s secret 2013 budget request to Congress. The budget document, disclosed by Mr. Snowden, shows that the agency is pouring money and manpower into creating a metadata repository capable of taking in 20 billion “record events” daily and making them available to N.S.A. analysts within 60 minutes.
The spending includes support for the “Enterprise Knowledge System,” which has a $394 million multiyear budget and is designed to “rapidly discover and correlate complex relationships and patterns across diverse data sources on a massive scale,” according to a 2008 document. The data is automatically computed to speed queries and discover new targets for surveillance.
A top-secret document titled “Better Person Centric Analysis” describes how the agency looks for 94 “entity types,” including phone numbers, e-mail addresses and IP addresses. In addition, the N.S.A. correlates 164 “relationship types” to build social networks and what the agency calls “community of interest” profiles, using queries like “travelsWith, hasFather, sentForumMessage, employs.”
A 2009 PowerPoint presentation provided more examples of data sources available in the “enrichment” process, including location-based services like GPS and TomTom, online social networks, billing records and bank codes for transactions in the United States and overseas.
At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday, General Alexander was asked if the agency ever collected or planned to collect bulk records about Americans’ locations based on cellphone tower data. He replied that it was not doing so as part of the call log program authorized by the Patriot Act, but said a fuller response would be classified.
If the N.S.A. does not immediately use the phone and e-mail logging data of an American, it can be stored for later use, at least under certain circumstances, according to several documents.
One 2011 memo, for example, said that after a court ruling narrowed the scope of the agency’s collection, the data in question was “being buffered for possible ingest” later. A year earlier, an internal briefing paper from the N.S.A. Office of Legal Counsel showed that the agency was allowed to collect and retain raw traffic, which includes both metadata and content, about “U.S. persons” for up to five years online and for an additional 10 years offline for “historical searches.”
James Risen reported from Washington and New York. Laura Poitras, a freelance journalist, reported from Berlin.

Army's Only Enlisted Sikh Soldier Earns Rare Promotion At JBLM

Tacoma News Tribune
September 28, 2013

 

Simranpreet Lamba stands out when he lines up with his fellow soldiers in his Joint Base Lewis-McChord cavalry troop. He’s the bearded one wearing the camouflage turban.
As the Army’s only enlisted Sikh soldier, Lamba, 29, feels the pressure to prove himself so others of his faith can put on a uniform and serve their country. He took a step toward that goal Friday when the Army promoted him to corporal, making him the first Sikh to earn that rank in more than 30 years.
“I kind of think all my hard work has paid off,” said Lamba, whose enlistment in 2009 triggered a 10-month review in which Army officials considered whether he could serve while sporting the articles of his faith — a turban, uncut hair and a beard.
He’s one of a handful of Sikhs serving in the Army across the active-duty and Reserve forces, according to the New York-based Sikh Coalition. Two of the others are in the medical field as officers, one a dentist and one a doctor.
Each current Sikh soldier had to gain an exemption allowing him to serve despite Army policies dating back to 1984 that require soldiers to shave, keep short hair and wear standard berets. Those rules prevented Sikhs from enlisting for decades.
They hail from a 500-year-old religion with roots in India’s Punjab Region. About 200,000 to 500,000 Sikhs live in the U.S., according to estimates from the Pew Research Center.
Lamba hopes his promotion will show “there’s nothing about being Sikh, about our turban and our beard that can stop us from excelling in the Army,” he said.
He enlisted through a military program that recruits foreigners with special skills and offers them a path to citizenship. Lamba, who has become a naturalized U.S. citizen, speaks Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi — languages vital to communication with the people of India and Pakistan.
He adapted his faith to his military service with a little creativity. He fashioned his camouflage turban by buying a sheet of cloth and cutting it to fit his needs. A Velcro patch on the front shows his rank, similar to how Army caps appear.
He has another turban that fits under his combat helmet, and he has found a way to firmly fix a gas mask to his face by applying petroleum jelly to his beard.
He moved to America from New Delhi in 2006 and found his way to the Army after he earned a master’s degree in industrial engineering from New York University.
He said he always wanted to serve his country in uniform. Enlisting let him fulfill that dream.
His promotion from specialist to corporal was a lateral move, but it signifies that he’s doing well and is on a path to becoming a sergeant. He’d be the first Sikh sergeant in decades if he earned that rank.
“Every time he gets promoted, he’s going to be a first,” said his commanding officer, Capt. Craig Morehead.
Lamba’s hitting his stride as a medic in the 3rd Squadron, 38th Cavalry Regiment at Lewis-McChord. It’s part of the base’s intelligence-gathering 201st Battlefield Surveillance Brigade.
“He’s very driven in everything he does,” said Sgt. 1st Class Edgar Baeza. “He’s always asking for more responsibilities.”
Baeza heard about Lamba before they met. The Sikh soldier has been featured in stories published by The New York Times, The Associated Press and Army Times.
“I was pretty excited when I found out he was going to be in my unit,” Baeza said. Lamba “has taught us a lot about his culture and upbringing.”
Lamba and his wife, Guneet, live in University Place. She notices he often brings his work home with him.
“He’s really a very hard worker,” she said. At bedtime, he’s always talking about what he needs to accomplish the next day, she said.
Lamba received a line of handshakes and hugs from his fellow soldiers after he received his new rank.
“I really look forward to a long career in the Army,” he told them.