The Watchers (66 page)

328
He turned to the president and said, “If the capability to exploit a communications device exists, we have to assume that our enemies either have it or are trying to develop it”:
Interview with one of the previously mentioned former administration officials. McConnell didn't recall the exact quote but didn't dispute this account.

328
officials found it so revealing that they decided to classify it:
McConnell to Wright,
The New Yorker.

328
He turned to Bush and said, “If the 9/11 perpetrators had focused on a single U.S. bank through cyberattack, and it had been successful, it would have had an order of magnitude greater impact on the U.S. economy”:
This is the quote as it appears in Wright's piece. McConnell agreed it was accurate, as did the two former administration officials who were also in the room.

328
“Is this true, Hank?” Bush asked:
Interview with McConnell and the two officials. Brenner, the counterintelligence chief, also told me in an interview that the exchange among Bush, McConnell, and Henry Paulson was accurate.

329
“This is our competitive advantage for the next seventy to a hundred years,” he said to the room:
Interview with McConnell. The account was confirmed by one of the former administration officials, who was present.

329
Homeland Security lacked the resident cyberexpertise and political clout to effectively do the job:
This is my assessment, based on my coverage of the department.

329
McConnell knew the political dangers:
See Wright's profile,
The New Yorker
.

329
McConnell believed that despite Americans' love of spy novels and James Bond movies, they mostly associated intelligence with duplicity and dirty dealings:
McConnell spoke about this love-hate relationship with spies in a speech at Furman University, his alma mater, on March 28, 2008. At
http://odni.gov/speeches/20080328_speech.pdf
.

332
The covert program, known as Operation Shamrock, was believed to have collected 150,000 messages per month at its peak:
See the U.S. Senate's “Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,” also known as the Church Committee, published April 23, 1976,
www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIIj.htm
.

333
McConnell thought that FISA had to be fixed:
It's true that McConnell came into office with reform of FISA on his agenda. But a former senior administration official, speaking on background, told me that the White House had been eyeing him for this job as well, because McConnell would bring the reputation of a professional and the imprimatur of the intelligence community to the debate. McConnell wanted to change the law. But the White House was making a political calculation in allowing him to become the point man for that effort.

333
He outlined his vision in an essay:
See “Overhauling Intelligence,”
Foreign Affairs,
July/ August 2007.

333
On January 10, 2007, a judge on the secretive FISA Court issued orders that essentially blessed much of what the administration had already been doing under its own authority:
See letter from Alberto Gonzales to Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter, January 17, 2007,
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/politics/20060117gonzales_Letter.pdf
.

334
unlike the first judge, who had given the administration the latitude it wanted, this one rejected a significant part of the arrangement that had been struck in January:
Interview with McConnell.

336
His captors had tortured him. He'd been burned, cut, and made to suffer:
Interview in 2008 with former senior CIA official, who asked not to be identified.

337
The next day, McConnell and his staff pulled an all-nighter to get ready for a meeting with the Democratic leadership:
The play-by-play of McConnell's negotiations with Democratic lawmakers is detailed concisely in Wright's
New Yorker
piece. Many journalists, including me, covered these negotiations.

339
“We have worked to achieve deep penetration of those who wish us harm”:
See McConnell's commencement address to George Washington University's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences on May 17, 2008,
http://odni.gov/speeches/20080517_speech.pdf
.

339
“The FISA court ruled presented the program to them and they said the program is what you say it is and it's appropriate and it's legitimate, it's not an issue and was had approval”:
See the transcript of McConnell's interview with Chris Roberts of the
El Paso Times
, published on August 22, 2007.

340
McConnell would insist that he meant pressure from
Congress: Interview with McConnell.

342
At the FBI and the White House some senior officials viewed him as a terrible choice for FISA point man:
These sentiments were conveyed to me by two former senior officials, one each at the White House and the FBI, who asked not to be identified. One of McConnell's former aides also told me that it had been a bad idea, politically, to put him in charge of the FISA reform effort.

347
He spent two semesters at American University in Cairo, and four years later he entered the clandestine service:
See Eli Lake's “CIA Vet Aids Obama On Anti-Terrorism,”
Washington Times
, March 1, 2009.

348
Brennan gave a wide-ranging interview:
I conducted the interview for
National Journal
. See “The Counterterror Campaign,” March 7, 2008.

350
Obama announced that he would be voting for the bill:
See the June 29, 2008, post “Barack Obama on FISA” at my.barackobama.com.

351
Obama had once been ranked the Senate's “most liberal” member:
See
National Journal
's “2007 Vote Ratings,” published January 21, 2008. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, came in second. Joe Biden, then a Democratic senator from Delaware, came in third.

352
He'd been at the CIA when the agency was in charge of preparing detailed “threat assessments”:
See the “Report on the President's Surveillance Program,” released on July 10, 2009, in which the inspectors general of five agencies and departments involved in the program explain the writing of threat assessments, which organizations wrote them, and how they were used. Brennan's tenure at the CIA and later at the Terrorist Threat Integration Center is a matter of public record.

352
On September 2, Mike McConnell prepared for an unusual intelligence briefing:
The account of Obama's first intelligence briefing comes from an interview with McConnell, as well as from another individual with direct knowledge of the briefing. Tom Fingar, the head of analysis at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, publicly stated that the meeting took place. He spoke at the “Analytic Transformation” conference in Orlando, Florida, on September 4, 2008.

353
“Until this point, I've been worried about losing this election,” he told McConnell and his colleagues. “After talking to you guys, I'm now worried about winning ”:
Interview with McConnell.

355
officials discovered that the agency had inadvertently collected the phone calls and e-mails of Americans:
This “overcollection” was first reported by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the
New York Times
on April 15, 2009: “Officials Say U.S. Wiretaps Exceeded Law.” I also discussed the matter with a congressional official who asked not to be identified.

357
the agency had rejected a new data-analysis system that had such protection built in:
See “NSA Rejected System That Sifted Phone Data Legally,” by Siobhan Gorman,
Baltimore Sun
, May 18, 2006.

361
A special appeals court, the Foreign Intelligence Court of Review, publicly announced its decision in a challenge to the Protect America Act:
The court decided the case on August 22, 2008, and it was publicly released in redacted form on January 15, 2009. Case No. 08-01,
In Re: Directives [Redacted] Pursuant to Section 105B of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
, is available from the U.S. Courts at
www.uscourts.gov/newsroom/2009/FISCR_Opinion.pdf?WT.cg_n=FISCR
Opinion_WhatsNew_homepage, and from the Federation of American Scientists at
www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/fiscr082208.pdf
. Importantly, the court also ruled that incidental collections of Americans' communications, of the kind that were later disclosed by Obama officials to have occurred under the amended FISA, were not in themselves illegal. So long as the surveillance itself was lawful and reasonable, such sweeping up of uninvolved parties wasn't a crime.

362
It was a clear, and perhaps rare, demonstration of a company's power to push back against the government:
Telecom lawyer and FISA expert Michael Sussmann wrote about the decision and companies' important role as a check on government surveillance in a blog post, “Rare FISA Court of Review Decision on Warrantless Surveillance,” on January 15, 2009,
www.digestiblelaw.com/electronicsurveillance/blogQ.aspx?entry=5295&id=32
.

362
That time, it sided with the government and in favor of broader surveillance authorities:
See
In Re: Sealed Case No. 02-001
, decided November 18, 2002,
http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/terrorism/fisa111802opn.pdf
.

362
a reporter asked Hayden what he thought:
See “Court Backs U.S. Wiretapping,” by Evan Perez,
Wall Street Journal
, January 16, 2009.

Abbas, Abu

Able Danger:

and Al Qaeda

code name of

comparisons with

data deleted

data mining in

network mapping by

public airing of

resurrection of

and secrecy

accountability, lack of

capture of hijackers

hijackers escaping

interception plan

isolate the ship

locate the ship

negotiations with hijackers

Sara Lee decision

success of mission

take the ship

track the ship

U.S. citizen killed

ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)

Addington, David

Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA)

Advanced Systems and Concepts Office

ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement)

Afghanistan, British policy in

airline industry:

ban on liquids in

bomb-sensing equipment

and British terrorist threat

invisibility

passenger profiling

stealth aircraft

and terrorist patterns

and TSA

Alcoff, Sam

Alexander, Keith

Ali, Ahmed Abdulla

Ali Baba

Allen, Charlie

Allen, Dick

Al Qaeda

Able Danger study of

bomb-building

and CIA

financing of

global network of

nexus of terrorism

search for

Special Operations mapping of

spread of

Al Qaeda

U.S. presence of

and USS
Cole

Amal

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

Anschutz, Philip

antisubmarine warfare

Arafat, Yasser

ARDA (Advanced Research and Development Activity)

Armour, Tom

Army, U.S.:

and
Achille Lauro

and IDC,
see
Information Dominance Center

Intelligence and Security Command

Intelligence Command

and intelligence gap

Land Information Warfare Activity

Signals Security Agency

Ashcroft, John

AT&T

Atta, Mohamed

Aum Shinrikyo

Bacon, Kevin

BAG (Big Ass Graph)

as ADVISE

creation of

failures of

financial data in

and graph theory

information overload in

and metadata

and Monitor

Stellar Wind as

and telecom records

Baginski, Maureen

Baltimore Gas & Electric

Basketball

Becker, Art

Beirut, Lebanon:

killings and kidnappings in

Marine barracks attacked in

see also
Lebanon

Berlin Wall, fall of

Beyster, Bob

Biden, Joe

bin Laden, Osama

Black, Bill

Black, Hugo L.

Black Hawk Down (1993)

Black Panthers

Blue Dogs

Boehner, John

Bojinka

Booz Allen Hamilton:

and Clapper

and cybersecurity to financial sector

and McConnell

and TIA

Brennan, John

Brenner, Joel

Britain:

security threat in

as surveillance state

Buckley, William

Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado

Bush, George H. W.

Bush, George W.

Bush administration:

and Able Danger cover-up