NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say if We Spied on You

Gen. Keith Alexander, center, the head of the National Security Agency, visits Afghanistan, 2010. Photo: ISAF

The surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won’t tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up by the agency as part of its sweeping new counterterrorism powers. The reason: it would violate your privacy to say so.

That claim comes in a short letter sent Monday to civil libertarian Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. The two members of the Senate’s intelligence oversight committee asked the NSA a simple question last month: under the broad powers granted in 2008′s expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, how many persons inside the United States have been spied upon by the NSA?

The query bounced around the intelligence bureaucracy until it reached I. Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the nominal head of the 16 U.S. spy agencies. In a letter acquired by Danger Room, McCullough told the senators that the NSA inspector general “and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would further violate the privacy of U.S. persons,” McCullough wrote.

“All that Senator Udall and I are asking for is a ballpark estimate of how many Americans have been monitored under this law, and it is disappointing that the Inspectors General cannot provide it,” Wyden told Danger Room on Monday. “If no one will even estimate how many Americans have had their communications collected under this law then it is all the more important that Congress act to close the ‘back door searches’ loophole, to keep the government from searching for Americans’ phone calls and emails without a warrant.”

What’s more, McCullough argued, giving such a figure of how many Americans were spied on was “beyond the capacity” of the NSA’s in-house watchdog — and to rectify it would require “imped[ing]” the very spy missions that concern Wyden and Udall. “I defer to [the NSA inspector general's] conclusion that obtaining such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office and dedicating sufficient additional resources would likely impede the NSA’s mission,” McCullough wrote.

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Iranian Missile Engineer Oversees Chavez’s Drones

The Karrar drone, Iran's first long-range unmanned bomber, goes on display at an undisclosed location on Aug. 22, 2010. Photo: Iranian Defense Ministry

The manager of Venezuela’s drone program is an engineer who helped build ballistic missiles for Iran. The engineer’s identity raises new questions about the purposes behind Venezuela’s drone program. But it’s also only one part of a mystery involving drones shipped from Iran to Venezuela while hidden in secret cargo containing possibly more military hardware than just ‘bots.

According to El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language sister paper of The Miami Herald, US officials believe Iran shipped drones to Venezuela hidden in cargo containers. The date and specific port are not known, but Venezuela only received six drones — in a shipment of 70 containers carrying each more than 24,000 pounds of cargo. The cargo was camouflaged as material “from Venirauto (Venezuelan-Iranian Automotive) through a Chilean company,” a source told the newspaper.

The containers were headed for a Venezuelan air base and the location for the M2 drone project, named after the Mohajer, a light surveillance drone manufactured by Iran. The supervisor, Ramin Keshavarz, is member of the Revolutionary Guards and former employee of Iran’s Defense Industry Organization, a firm embargoed by the United States for overseeing Iran’s ballistic missile program. The stealthy cargo, the Iranian missile engineer, and more than a million pounds of unaccounted weight, was not all. “Excessively high” amounts of money are paid for the drone program, much higher than the total cost of the ‘bots.

Also under investigation is a Parchin Industries site in Morón, Venezuela. Parchin is believed to make fuel for Iran’s mid-range missiles and has been accused by the International Atomic Energy Agency of conducting explosive tests inside a containment chamber located in Iran. Morón also houses a joint Iranian-Venezuelan gunpowder factory. Venezuela is also testing six Iranian drone models, with three under “special suspicion” for being not what they seem: the Justiciero, Vengador and Venezolano drones. In other words, US officials believe these drones could be more than just drones.

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White House, Citing Public’s Right to Know, Stonewalls on Yemen War

President Obama backstage at a May speech in Albany, New York. Photo: Pete Souza/ White House

The center of the US drone war has shifted to Yemen, where 23 American strikes have killed an estimated 155 people so far this year. But you wouldn’t know about it — or about the cruise missile attacks, or about the US commando teams in Yemen — by reading the report the White House sent to Congress about US military activities around the globe. Instead, there’s only the blandest acknowledgement of “direct action” in Yemen, “against a limited number of [al-Qaida] operatives and senior leaders.”

The report, issued late Friday, is the first time the United States has publicly, officially acknowledged the operations in Yemen and in nearby Somalia that anyone with internet access could’ve told you about years ago. But the report doesn’t just fail to admit the extent of the shadow war that America is waging in the region. It’s borderline legal — at best. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires the president to inform Congress about any armed conflicts America is engaged in. Friday’s report isn’t just uninformative about Yemen. It doesn’t even mention the US campaign in Pakistan, even though the Defense Secretary says America is “at war” there.

“The American people are well aware of the threat that al-Qaida poses, and in a democratic society, they have a right to know what actions their government is taking in an effort to protect them. A well-informed public is critical to maintaining the legitimacy of, and in turn our ability to sustain, our ongoing counterterrorism efforts.” These are the words not of some good government crusader or some critic of the president, but of an administration official, explaining the White House’s recent report in an email to Danger Room.

The report does exactly the opposite, however: obscuring the shadow wars that America is waging in the region, rather than illuminating them; actively undermining the public’s right to know, rather than reinforcing it.

“The report, if you can call it such, is a waste of paper and computer space,” writes intelligence historian Matthew Aid. ”You literally learn nothing about the nature and extent of U.S. military combat operations overseas…. Even Adam Sandler movies have more substantive and meaningful content than this letter to Congress.”

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Satellite Spots Lockheed’s Mystery Drone

An overhead image of Lockheed Martin's "Skunk Works" facility: Photo: Google Earth

A commercial satellite has spotted a mysterious unmanned aerial vehicle parked at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California. The orbital snapshot was reportedly taken on Dec. 4, but became public only last week in a blog post by George Kaplan, a self-described “open source” intelligence analyst who relies solely on publicly available imagery.

Wrapped in what appears to be plastic, parked at an angle next to an F-16 on a concrete apron near the U.S. Air Force’s top-secret Plant 42, the supposed UAV shares the basic dimensions and overall flying-wing shape of many of today’s jet-powered drones. Using the 50-foot-long F-16 as a yardstick, it seems the UAV has a wingspan of around 60 feet.

Beyond that, anything we say about the “new” drone is conjecture. We emailed a Lockheed spokesperson asking for comment, but the company does not habitually comment on the goings-on at the Skunk Works, whose other products have included the F-117 stealth fighter and the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes.

That said, the mystery drone’s wingspan seems to match the consensus figure for the wingspan of Lockheed’s secretive RQ-170 Sentinel, also a Skunk Works design. The stealthy RQ-170 was first spotted at Afghanistan’s Kandahar Air Field in 2007. Two years later the Air Force confessed to operating a small number of Sentinels for “reconnaissance and surveillance.”

On Dec. 4, coincidentally the same day Kaplan’s snapshot was taken, Iranian forces captured a crashed Sentinel near the Iran-Afghanistan border, provoking a diplomatic row. As revealed by the Iranians, the crashed Sentinel’s maintenance logs indicated that it, or at least parts of it, had been sent back to Palmdale from Afghanistan for maintenance. Noted aviation journalist David Cenciotti connected these dots in his own search for the mystery drone’s identity. “I think it’s a Sentinel,” he tells Danger Room. “A damaged one.”
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War With Friends: Pentagon Eyes a Drone App Store

An MQ-1 Predator instructor with the California Air National Guard remotely controls his drone. He might control more than one, if a new Pentagon project comes to fruition. Photo: National Guard Bureau

The US military has dozens of different types of drones in its arsenal. Each one has its own unique controller. And each of those various controllers flies a single robot. There’s no system that controls multiple drones at once. One Pentagon office thinks that’s an archaic way of doing business.

Inside the Pentagon’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics directorate, a team is working on ways to operate different types of drones with a single controller. It’s a big technical challenge — one that’s failed in the past — since the different manufacturers of different drones each have proprietary control software. But the official in charge of the effort envisions a new drone software architecture that’s agnostic about what kind of drone it controls; and allows human controllers to think in terms of drone fleets rather than individual robots, including fleets comprising different kinds of drones. That would enable a dramatic expansion of the possibilities of drone warfare.

Step one is to get a kind of universal remote for the drones — that is, a controller that can operate, say, an armed Predator and a robotic spy. It’s a major challenge.

“The objective is to be able to ‘shop’ for mission specific applications and services from a single ‘App Store’,” says Rich Ernst, the Pentagon’s lead officer for what’s called the Unmanned Aerial Systems Control Segment, or UCS, in an emailed statement to Danger Room. “The methodology is akin to the commercial ‘smart-phone’ industry, wherein applications are down-loaded to suit individual user taste and productivity. The repository allows small software businesses to compete on a level playing field” with the major defense conglomerates.

The first such company is California-based DreamHammer. DreamHammer has developed software that can operate numerous robots from the same tablet or laptop. Known as Ballista and first reported by Kashmir Hill at Forbes, it’s a layer that sits on top of the proprietary software governing Predators, Global Hawks, and the rest of the military’s robotic aviary, using application programming interfaces, or APIs.

DreamHammer’s CEO, Nelson Paez, has brought Ballista to Ernst’s attention. Ballista aims to be the first-ever multi-drone operating system — basically, the universal remote. And that would cut through what Paez and Ernst see as an expensive irony. “Currently,” Paez tells Danger Room, “it takes more people to operate unmanned systems than it takes to operate manned systems.”

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