U.S. Admits Surveillance Violated Constitution At Least Once

A plaque commemorates National Security Agency operatives at the agency’s Fort Meade, Maryland headquarters. Photo:Ryan Somma/Flickr

Updated, 6:15 p.m.

The head of the U.S. government’s vast spying apparatus has conceded that recent surveillance efforts on at least one occasion violated the Constitutional prohibitions on unlawful search and seizure.

The admission comes in a letter from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassifying statements that a top U.S. Senator wished to make public in order to call attention to the government’s 2008 expansion of its key surveillance law.

“On at least one occasion,” the intelligence shop has approved Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to say, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found that “minimization procedures” used by the government while it was collecting intelligence were “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.” Minimization refers to how long the government may retain the surveillance data it collects.  The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is supposed to guarantee our rights against unreasonable searches.

Wyden does not specify how extensive this “unreasonable” surveillance was; when it occurred; or how many Americans were affected by it.

In the letter, acquired by Danger Room (.pdf), Wyden asserts a serious federal sidestep of a major section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

That section — known as Section 702 and passed in 2008 — sought to legalize the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance efforts. The 2008 law permitted intelligence officials to conduct surveillance on the communications of “non-U.S. persons,” when at least one party on a call, text or email is “reasonably believed” to be outside of the United States. Government officials conducting such surveillance no longer have to acquire a warrant from the so-called FISA Court specifying the name of an individual under surveillance. And only a “significant purpose” of the surveillance has to be the acquisition of “foreign intelligence,” a weaker standard than before 2008.

Wyden says that the government’s use of the expanded surveillance authorities “has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law” — a conclusion that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence does not endorse. The office does not challenge the statement about the FISA Court on at least one occasion finding the surveillance to conflict with the Fourth Amendment. Danger Room initially misunderstood the letter to mean that its author, top intelligence official Kathleen Turner, made the statements she was merely informing Wyden he could to issue publicly without revealing classified information.

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Real-Life Horror: Shooter Slays 12 At Dark Knight Screening

Police are pictured outside of a Century 16 movie theatre where as many as 14 people were killed and many injured at a shooting during the showing of a movie at the in Aurora, Colo., Friday, July 20, 2012. Photo: Ed Andrieski/AP

The brutality of Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City became horrifyingly real during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado as a gunman burst into the theater and murdered at least 12 people. And at least some in the theater initially thought the incident was part of the show.

Information about the massacre is still sketchy, but what’s emerged so far is that a man wearing body armor and carrying a rifle burst into the ninth theater at the Central 16 cineplex in the Denver suburb. Entering from the emergency exit, he threw what police described as two gas canister before beginning a shooting spree that wounded 71 people — at least 12 fatally, 10 of whom died in the movie theater.

According to Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates, a 24-year old man, James Eagan Holmes, was armed with a .40-caliber Glock pistol; an AR-15 assault rifle; and a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun. He was heavily armored, wearing a black ballistic helmet, vest, groin and neck protection, leggings, gloves and a gas mask. His car was parked in the back of the cineplex and contained a second Glock. Police responded to the scene within 90 seconds of receiving the first 911 calls and subdued Holmes in the back of the theater without harm to officers.

“We were just watching the movie and up to the right it sounded liked some firecrackers went off,” Zachary Golditch, who was seeing the movie in the nearby Theater 8, told local TV news. Golditch was shot in the neck, “a clear in and out wound,” as the chaos spread to theater eight.

Another moviegoer in Theater 8, Alex Milano, told a reporter that “loud bangs and smoke took over the right of the theater.” Before he realized he was under attack, Milano said he and a friend thought, “Special effects, midnight showing, that’s awesome, what theater does that anymore.” But when he saw “something come through the wall, multiple objects flow through the wall,” he dropped his younger sister and himself to the ground and spirited them out of the movie.

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U.S. Missile Shield May Make China Build Better Missiles

Guided missile destroyer U.S.S. Hopper launches a SM-3 interceptor at a test ballistic missile in the Pacific on July 31, 2009. Photo: Navy

China has bet the security of its billion citizens largely around one weapon system: missiles. Which is why planned U.S. advancements to Washington’s mobile missile shield is freaking Beijing out. Its military chiefs figure they need to upgrade their own cache of various missiles or risk losing the ability to deter the U.S. Navy and Air Force. Not exactly the response American military planners had in mind.

The PLA “will have to modernize its nuclear arsenal” because American missile interceptors “may reduce the credibility of its nuclear deterrence,” Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu of China’s National Defense University told a panel in Beijing on Wednesday. Chenghu elaborated to a Reuters reporter that the U.S.
interceptor system “undermines the strategic stability.” He was referring to the United States’ planned anti-ballistic missile system, which is slim at the moment, but by 2020 is supposed to shield Europe from short, mid-range and eventually intercontinental missile attacks.

While the shield is intended to defend Europe against an attack from Iran, the interceptors are both land- and ship-based — meaning the system can be packed up and moved. If, say, North Korea starts tossing missiles around, the United States could send ships to shoot them down. Those same ships, Chenghu’s thinking goes, could be used against China.

China depends on missiles more than you might think. While China is modernizing its military by boosting its defense budget, retrofitting a Russian aircraft carrier, and building new submarines and destroyers, its security in the near term depends on its massive stockpile of missiles. The U.S. believes China possesses 130 to 195 missiles capable of being armed with nuclear warheads, according to Reuters. To fill gaps in its conventional military, China has boosted its missile arsenal up to nearly 2,000 non-nuclear ballistic and cruise missiles. It could potentially lob around a thousand of them as an initial strike weapon against Taiwan or U.S. bases in the Pacific.

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GPS Hijacking Catches Feds, Drone Makers Off Guard

The University of Texas Radionavigation Laboratory drone, an Adaptive Flight Hornet Mini. Photo: Courtesy Todd Humphreys

UPDATED 7/20/12, 11.30AM

On June 19, when University of Texas researchers successfully hijacked a drone by “spoofing” it — giving it bad GPS coordinates – they showed the Department of Homeland Security how civilian drones could fall into the wrong hands, exposing a potentially serious security flaw. It was exactly what Todd Humphreys, the lead researcher, anticipated in a TEDx talk in February: “You can scarcely imagine the kind of havoc you could cause if you knew what you were doing with a GPS spoofer.”

On Thursday, a month after the experiment, the investigations panel of the House Homeland Security Committee held a hearing on how civilian drones could affect the security of the American airspace. “These findings are alarming and have revealed a gaping hole in the security of using unmanned aerial systems domestically,” said Rep. Michael McCall, the panel’s chairman. “Now is the time to ensure these vulnerabilities are mitigated to protect our aviation system as the use of unmanned aerial systems continues to grow.”

Problem is, the FAA and the Department of Homeland security have yet to come up with specific requirements or a certified system to protect drones from GPS attacks. And what’s worse, neither of them takes responsibility for it. “The Department of Homeland Security mission is to protect the homeland. Unfortunately, DHS seems either disinterested or unprepared to step up to the plate,” said McCall, noting that representatives from the DHS declined to testify at the hearing. The FAA declined to comment on GPS security after the spoofing test.

Some of the drone manufacturers have their own systems to counter spoofing attacks, but others either think this is not their job, are not worried at all, or were completely taken by surprise.

“We’ve always been aware of [GPS threats like] jamming and lost satellites,” said Dennis D’Annunzio, Chief Technical Officer of drone maker Rotomotion, which produces drones used by local police like the North Little Rock Police Department in Arkansas. “But spoofing and taking control was something that we weren’t anticipating.”

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Syria’s Ballistic Missile Arsenal Looms As Assad Regime Buckles

If in its final hours Syria’s crumbling government unleashes a chemical barrage — and some analysts certainly think that’s possible — the regime will probably rely on an arsenal of gas- or nerve agent-tipped ballistic missiles purchased from Iran and North Korea.

But precisely how many and what mix of missiles President Bashar Al Assad controls, and therefore how deadly a chemical strike might be, both remain unclear. Equally unclear is how far the world should go to defend against such a strike.

Chances are, Syria possesses at least three types of ballistic missile that can be fitted with chemical warheads, according to Dr. Jeffrey Lewis from the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California. These include Scuds and SS-21s acquired from North Korea and, less clearly, Fateh 110s transferred from Iran.

The Fateh 110s and SS-21s, both around 20 feet long, can reach just 50 and 120 miles, respectively. The Scuds, at 35 feet long, have a longer range: up to 400 miles. All the missiles are mobile — that is, they’re carried and launched by wheeled or tracked vehicles. The Scud’s so-called Transporter Erector Launcher is a heavy-duty offroad truck the size of a tractor trailer.

They’re all also unguided, with abysmal accuracy — 200 feet at best, in the Scud’s case. That means it can takes a lot of missiles to hit one target. According to various sources, Syria’s stockpile could include between 100 and 300 Scuds, maybe 200 SS-21s and probably no more than 50 Fatehs.

The Scuds and SS-21s have been widely reported and even glimpsed in recent satellite imagery and in the video above, shot in June by the Free Syrian Army. These two missile types have guest-starred in scores of conflicts since the Cold War. Most recently, Iraq lobbed Scuds at coalition troops in 1991 and 2003. Russia fired SS-21s at Georgian forces in 2009.

But the Fatehs are “something no one talks about,” Lewis, who also blogs at Arms Control Wonk, tells Danger Room. “That boggles my mind.” The Fatehs are just part of a growing portfolio of Iranian-designed missiles and rockets meant mostly for domestic use in Iran’s escalating standoff with most of the rest of the world and, to a lesser extent, for export.

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