New York Times
September 30, 2013
Pg. 1
By Eric Schmitt and Michael S. Schmidt
WASHINGTON — As the nation’s spy agencies assess the fallout from disclosures
about their surveillance programs, some government analysts and senior officials
have made a startling finding: the impact of a leaked terrorist plot by Al Qaeda
in August has caused more immediate damage to American counterterrorism efforts
than the thousands of classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, the
former National Security Agency contractor.
Since news reports in early August revealed that the United States
intercepted messages between Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as
the head of Al Qaeda, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al
Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, discussing an imminent terrorist attack,
analysts have detected a sharp drop in the terrorists’ use of a major
communications channel that the authorities were monitoring. Since August,
senior American officials have been scrambling to find new ways to surveil the
electronic messages and conversations of Al Qaeda’s leaders and operatives.
“The switches weren’t turned off, but there has been a real decrease in
quality” of communications, said one United States official, who like others
quoted spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence programs.
The drop in message traffic after the communication intercepts contrasts with
what analysts describe as a far more muted impact on counterterrorism efforts
from the disclosures by Mr. Snowden of the broad capabilities of N.S.A.
surveillance programs. Instead of terrorists moving away from electronic
communications after those disclosures, analysts have detected terrorists mainly
talking about the information that Mr. Snowden has disclosed.
Senior American officials say that Mr. Snowden’s disclosures have had a
broader impact on national security in general, including counterterrorism
efforts. This includes fears that Russia and China now have more technical
details about the N.S.A. surveillance programs. Diplomatic ties have also been
damaged, and among the results was the decision by Brazil’s president, Dilma
Rousseff, to postpone a state visit to the United States in protest over
revelations that the agency spied on her, her top aides and Brazil’s largest
company, the oil giant Petrobras.
The communication intercepts between Mr. Zawahri and Mr. Wuhayshi revealed
what American intelligence officials and lawmakers have described as one of the
most serious plots against American and other Western interests since the
attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. It prompted the closing of 19 United States Embassies
and consulates for a week, when the authorities ultimately concluded that the
plot focused on the embassy in Yemen.
McClatchy Newspapers first reported on the conversations between Mr. Zawahri
and Mr. Wuhayshi on Aug. 4. Two days before that, The New York Times agreed to
withhold the identities of the Qaeda leaders after senior American intelligence
officials said the information could jeopardize their operations. After the
government became aware of the McClatchy article, it dropped its objections to
The Times’s publishing the same information, and the newspaper did so on Aug.
5.
In recent months, senior administration officials — including the director of
national intelligence, James Clapper Jr. — have drawn attention to the damage
that Mr. Snowden’s revelations have done, though most have been addressing the
impact on national security more broadly, not just the effect on
counterterrorism.
“We have seen, in response to the Snowden leaks, Al Qaeda and affiliated
groups seeking to change their tactics, looking to see what they can learn from
what is in the press and seek to change how they communicate to avoid
detection,” Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center,
told a security conference in Aspen, Colo., in July.
American counterterrorism officials say they believe the disclosure about the
Qaeda plot has had a significant impact because it was a specific event that
signaled to terrorists that a main communication network that the group’s
leaders were using was being monitored. The sharpest decline in messaging has
been among the Qaeda operatives in Yemen, officials said. The disclosures from
Mr. Snowden have not had such specificity about terrorist communications
networks that the government is monitoring, they said.
“It was something that was immediate, direct and involved specific people on
specific communications about specific events,” one senior American official
said of the exchange between the Qaeda leaders. “The Snowden stuff is layered
and layered, and it will take a lot of time to understand it. There wasn’t a
sudden drop-off from it. A lot of these guys think that they are not impacted by
it, and it is difficult stuff for them to understand.”
Other senior intelligence and counterterrorism officials offer a dissenting
view, saying that it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the impact of
the messages between the Qaeda leaders from Mr. Snowden’s overall disclosures,
and that the decline is more likely a combination of the two.
“The bad guys are just not going to talk operational planning
electronically,” said one senior counterterrorism official. Moreover, that
official and others say, it could take months or years to fully assess the
impact of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures on counterterrorism efforts.
Over the past decade, the N.S.A. has invested billions of dollars in a
clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. The agency has
circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that
guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade
secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web
searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the
world, according to documents provided by Mr. Snowden.
The government’s greatest fear concerning its counterterrorism operations is
that over the next several months, the level of intercepted communications will
continue to fall as terrorists most likely find new ways to communicate with one
another, one senior American official said. It will likely take the government
some time to break into that method and monitor communications.
One way the terrorists may try to communicate, the official said, is strictly
through couriers, who would carry paper notes or computer flash drives. If that
happens, the official said, terrorists will find it very difficult to
communicate as couriers take significant time to move messages.
“The problem for Al Qaeda is they cannot function without cellphones,” said
one former senior administration official. “They know we listen to them, but
they use them anyhow. You can’t run a sophisticated organization without
communications in this world. They know all this, but to operate they have to go
on.”
A senior intelligence official put it this way: “They are agile, we are
agile. When we see a change in behavior, our guys are changing right along with
it, or we’re already seeing it and adapting to it. Our capabilities are changing
in hours and days, versus weeks and months like we used to.”
To be sure, Qaeda leaders and their top lieutenants use other secure
electronic communications as well as old-fashioned means — like couriers, as Bin
Laden did — that pose major challenges to American intelligence services.
In the past few months, the Global Islamic Media Front, the propaganda arm of
Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups, has released new software that
allows users to encrypt communications for instant-messaging and cellphones.
Officials say these new programs may pose fresh challenges for N.S.A. code
breakers.
Jihadists have been working on camouflaging their communications through
encryption software for years.
Al Qaeda’s use of advanced encryption technology dates to 2007, when the
Global Islamic Media Front released the Asrar al-Mujahedeen, or so-called
“Mujahedeen Secrets,” software. An updated version, Mujahedeen Secrets 2, was
released in January 2008, and has been revised at least twice, most recently in
May 2012, analysts said.
The program was popularized in the first issue of Inspire, Al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula’s quarterly online magazine, in a July 2010 post entitled “How
to Use Asrar al-Mujahedeen: Sending and Receiving Encrypted Messages.”
Since then, each issue of Inspire has offered a how-to section on encrypting
communications, recommending MS2 as the main encryption tool.
Shortly after Mr. Snowden leaked documents about the secret N.S.A.
surveillance programs, chat rooms and Web sites used by jihadis and prospective
recruits advised users how to avoid N.S.A. detection, from telling them to avoid
using Skype to recommending specific online software programs like MS2 to keep
spies from tracking their computers’ physical locations.
A few months ago, the Global Islamic Media Front issued new software that
relies on the MS2’s “Asrar al-Dardashah, or “Secrets of Chatting,” which allows
users to encrypt conversations over instant-messaging software like Paltalk,
Google Chat, Yahoo and MSN, according to Laith Alkhouri, a senior analyst at
Flashpoint Global Partners, a New York security consulting firm that tracks
militant Web sites.
In early September, the Global Islamic Media Front said it had released an
encryption program for messages and files on mobile phones running the Android
and Symbian operating systems.
According to the group, the software can encrypt text messages and files and
send them by e-mail or between cellphones with different operating systems. The
software also lets users securely check e-mail and prevents users from receiving
nonencrypted messages, the group claimed.
