Government Accountability Chief Resigns
By Elizabeth Williamson
The Washington Post
Saturday 16 February 2008

One of government's chief internal watchdogs resigned yesterday, as Comptroller General David M. Walker, an outspoken gadfly and frequent witness on Capitol Hill, announced his plans to lead a new foundation focused on U.S. fiscal responsibility.
Walker has led the Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative agency, for a decade.
Walker was an outspoken critic of the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare spending - issues on which the Democratic-led Congress, and Republicans before it, have had trouble building consensus.
In September, the administration and the military took issue with a bleak GAO assessment of progress in Iraq; the top military command in Baghdad described the assessment as flawed and "factually incorrect." Despite last-minute changes to address the criticism, the final report cast serious doubt on U.S. efforts to build a functioning democracy in Iraq.
At the time, Walker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "Given the fact that significant progress has not been made in improving the living conditions of the Iraqis on a day-to-day basis with regard to things that all citizens care about - safe streets, clean water, reliable electricity, a variety of other basic things ... I think you'd have to say it's dysfunctional - the government is dysfunctional."
Most of Walker's tenure was spent with Republicans in control of both the White House and Congress, and he has frequently irritated both bodies with his dire warnings on reining in spending.
During that time, "I would give Walker high marks for trying to stand up for GAO priorities even though he had a Congress that was trying to block him and which didn't want to know what the White House was up to," said Scott Lilly, senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress.
"He handled it as forcefully as he could, given that the Congress that was funding him was discouraging him."
The Walker-era GAO filed, but then declined to appeal, legal action to force Vice President Cheney to provide notes and information about meetings he held with energy companies while developing U.S. energy policy. A related suit wound up before the Supreme Court, which upheld the vice president's refusal to make the information public.
Walker's resignation takes effect March 12. He will lead the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a new think tank whose mission, according to its Web site is "to enhance public understanding of the nature and urgency of selected key sustainability challenges that threaten America's future," including "unsustainable" growth in entitlement spending, and energy consumption.
The GAO's chief operating officer, Gene Dodaro, will serve as acting comptroller general until a successor for Walker is found.
"The one thing that bothers me the most, given this president's record on nominations: It's not likely we're going to get a new comptroller before next year," Lilly said.
"That's a very sad thing, given how much institutional leadership means toward improving oversight over government."

Error Gave FBI Unauthorized Access to E-Mail

By Eric Lichtblau
The New York Times
Sunday 17 February 2008

Washington - A technical glitch gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network - perhaps hundreds of accounts or more - instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.

F.B.I. officials blamed an "apparent miscommunication" with the unnamed Internet provider, which mistakenly turned over all the e-mail from a small e-mail domain for which it served as host. The records were ultimately destroyed, officials said.

Bureau officials noticed a "surge" in the e-mail activity they were monitoring and realized that the provider had mistakenly set its filtering equipment to trap far more data than a judge had actually authorized.

The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect.


The problem has received no discussion as part of the fierce debate in Congress about whether to expand the government's wiretapping authorities and give legal immunity to private telecommunications companies that have helped in those operations.

But an intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because surveillance operations are classified, said: "It's inevitable that these things will happen. It's not weekly, but it's common."

A report in 2006 by the Justice Department inspector general found more than 100 violations of federal wiretap law in the two prior years by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, many of them considered technical and inadvertent.

Bureau officials said they did not have updated public figures but were preparing them as part of a wider-ranging review by the inspector general into misuses of the bureau's authority to use so-called national security letters in gathering phone records and financial documents in intelligence investigations.


In the warrantless wiretapping program approved by President Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, technical errors led officials at the National Security Agency on some occasions to monitor communications entirely within the United States - in apparent violation of the program's protocols - because communications problems made it difficult to tell initially whether the targets were in the country or not.

Past violations by the government have also included continuing a wiretap for days or weeks beyond what was authorized by a court, or seeking records beyond what were authorized. The 2006 case appears to be a particularly egregious example of what intelligence officials refer to as "overproduction" - in which a telecommunications provider gives the government more data than it was ordered to provide.

The problem of overproduction is particularly common, F.B.I. officials said. In testimony before Congress in March 2007 regarding abuses of national security letters, Valerie E. Caproni, the bureau's general counsel, said that in one small sample, 10 out of 20 violations were a result of "third-party error," in which a private company "provided the F.B.I. information we did not seek."

The 2006 episode was disclosed as part of a new batch of internal documents that the F.B.I. turned over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that advocates for greater digital privacy protections, as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the group has brought. The group provided the documents on the 2006 episode to The New York Times.

Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the privacy foundation, said the episode raised troubling questions about the technical and policy controls that the F.B.I. had in place to guard against civil liberties abuses.

"How do we know what the F.B.I. does with all these documents when a problem like this comes up?" Ms. Hofmann asked.

In the cyber era, the incident is the equivalent of law enforcement officials getting a subpoena to search a single apartment, but instead having the landlord give them the keys to every apartment in the building. In February 2006, an F.B.I. technical unit noticed "a surge in data being collected" as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal bureau report. An Internet provider was supposed to be providing access to the e-mail of a single target of that investigation, but the F.B.I. soon realized that the filtering controls used by the company "were improperly set and appeared to be collecting data on the entire e-mail domain" used by the individual, according to the report.


The bureau had first gotten authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor the e-mail of the individual target 10 months earlier, in April 2005, according to the internal F.B.I. document. But Michael Kortan, an F.B.I. spokesman, said in an interview that the problem with the unfiltered e-mail went on for just a few days before it was discovered and fixed. "It was unintentional on their part," he said.

Mr. Kortan would not disclose the name of the Internet provider or the network domain because the national security investigation, which is classified, is continuing. The improperly collected e-mail was first segregated from the court-authorized data and later was destroyed through unspecified means. The individuals whose e-mail was collected apparently were never informed of the problem. Mr. Kortan said he could not say how much e-mail was mistakenly collected as a result of the error, but he said the volume "was enough to get our attention." Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who reviewed the documents, said it would most likely have taken hundreds or perhaps thousands of extra messages to produce the type of "surge" described in the F.B.I.'s internal reports.

Mr. Kortan said that once the problem was detected the foreign intelligence court was notified, along with the Intelligence Oversight Board, which receives reports of possible wiretapping violations.

"This was a technical glitch in an area of evolving tools and technology and fast-paced investigations," Mr. Kortan said. "We moved quickly to resolve it and stop it. The system worked exactly the way it's designed."
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Court Dismisses Lawsuit on Secret Kidnapping
Reuters
Wednesday 13 February 2008
San Francisco - A federal judge, saying the case involved a state secret, dismissed a lawsuit on Wednesday against a unit of Boeing Co that charged the firm helped fly terrorism suspects abroad to secret prisons.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint in May accusing Jeppesen Dataplan Inc of providing flight and logistical support to the U.S. government with at least 15 aircraft on 70 "extraordinary-rendition" flights.
"In sum, at the core of plaintiffs' case against Defendant Jeppesen are 'allegations' of covert U.S. military or CIA operations in foreign countries against foreign nationals - clearly a subject matter which is a state secret," Judge James Ware wrote in a ruling issued on Wednesday evening.
The court "grants the United States' motion to dismiss on the ground that the very subject matter of the case is a state secret."
The complaint to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleged Jeppesen "falsified flight plans to European air traffic control authorities to avoid public scrutiny of CIA flights."
The ACLU filed the suit on behalf of five men who say the CIA had them flown to foreign prisons for interrogations and torture. The plaintiffs are an Ethiopian living in Britain; an Italian who was working in Pakistan; an Egyptian citizen living in Sweden; a Yemeni; and an Iraqi who is a British resident.
The government argued the case should be dismissed because they could not confirm details of the operations.
Those details "include whether any private entities or other countries assisted the CIA in conducting the program; the dates and locations of any detentions and interrogations; the methods of interrogation employed in the program; and the names of any individuals detained and interrogated by the CIA (other than fifteen individuals whose identities have been divulged so that they can be brought to trial)," the U.S. government said in its filing last year.
The judge mentioned he had reviewed a classified declaration from Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, in its assessment of the case.
"The Court's review of General Hayden's public and classified declarations confirm that proceeding with this case would jeopardize national security and foreign relations and that no protective procedure can salvage this case," Ware wrote.
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Reporting by Adam Tanner; Editing by Peter Cooney

By John Holusha
The New York Times
Thursday 14 February 2008

The House of Representatives voted Thursday to cite two White House aides for contempt for refusing to testify about their participation in the firing of federal law enforcement officials.
The measure calls for House officials to seek enforcement of the contempt citation by the courts if, as expected, the Justice Department declines to act on the resolution.
The vote was a lopsided 223 to 32 in favor of the contempt citation, after most Republican members walked out to protest what their leaders called a political move. Instead, they said, the House should be voting on the extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act approved by the Senate earlier this week.
The resolution would seek to compel testimony from Harriet E. Miers, who was White House counsel when several United States attorneys were replaced; Democrats contend that replacements were for political reasons.
It would also order Joshua B. Bolten, the president's chief of staff, to produce documents related to the dismissals.
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said that the House vote came about six months after the Judiciary Committee voted for contempt and that the White House resisted any effort to reach a reasonable compromise.
Both Ms. Miers and Mr. Bolten were instructed by the White House not to comply with the Judiciary Committee's requests for testimony and information and neither appeared before the panel.
Ms. Pelosi framed the dispute in constitutional terms, saying that if Congress could not compel testimony from White House officials, it would lose it power of oversight on the administration's actions.
Republicans said the House was wasting its time on a partisan stunt while the nation's security was being endangered by allowing legislation allowing advanced eavesdropping to expire.
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By Eric Lichtblau
The New York Times
Thursday 14 February 2008

Washington - Broad spying powers temporarily approved by Congress in August appear likely to lapse this week after a daylong game of chicken on Wednesday between the White House and House Democrats produced no clear resolution.
At a morning appearance in the Oval Office, President Bush pressed the House to adopt quickly a plan that the Senate approved on Tuesday to broaden the government's spying powers and give legal immunity to telephone companies.
The plan is essential, Mr. Bush said, because terrorists are planning attacks on American soil "that will make Sept. 11 pale in comparison."
House Democratic leaders tried to obtain a 21-day reprieve to allow more time to negotiate before the temporary measure expires on Friday night. But the proposal was defeated in the face of opposition from liberals who are against the surveillance plan and conservatives who favor it.
House Democrats now say they may simply let the deadline pass without acting on the Senate plan.
Mr. Bush maintained on Wednesday that letting the broadened surveillance powers lapse "would jeopardize the security of our citizens."
Democrats insisted that a lapse would have no real effect.
The expiration of the powers "doesn't mean we are somehow vulnerable again," said Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
The lapsing of the deadline would have little practical effect on intelligence gathering. Intelligence officials would be able to intercept communications from Qaeda members or other identified terrorist groups for a year after the initial eavesdropping authorization for that particular group.
If a new terrorist group is identified after Saturday, intelligence officials would not be able to use the broadened eavesdropping authority. They would be able to seek a warrant under the more restrictive standards in place for three decades through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The White House-backed plan that the Senate approved would broaden the spying powers for six years and provide legal immunity to the utilities that helped in the eavesdropping without warrants that Mr. Bush approved after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.
AT&T and other major carriers face about 40 multibillion-dollar suits from customers who say the utilities' participation broke the law.
The passage of the Senate measure, a major victory for Mr. Bush on a crucial national security question, inflamed the oratory on Wednesday. Mr. Bush accused the Democratic-led House of needlessly prolonging the debate at the expense of the country's safety.
"At this moment," he said, "somewhere in the world terrorists are planning new attacks on our country. Their goal is to bring destruction to our shores that will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison."
To stop an attack, he urged, Congress must act immediately to strengthen the eavesdropping.
In the House, which passed a more restrictive surveillance plan in November that intentionally left out protection for the utilities, Democratic leaders were not swayed.
"The president's presentation this morning was, I think, basically dishonest," said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader.
Intelligence officials could continue intercepting suspect communications even if the deadline passes, Mr. Hoyer said. In pushing so hard for immunity for the utilities, he added, the Bush administration is "very nervous about what might be disclosed" if the lawsuits against the companies are allowed to continue.
"To some degree, therefore, I think it is a cover-up," Mr. Hoyer said.
Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican presidential hopeful, weighed in on the debate. When Mr. McCain learned that the House had voted down a 21-day extension and that the powers were likely to lapse at midnight Friday, he said: "That's too bad. That's very unfortunate. It's symptomatic of the gridlock of partisanship here in the Congress."
To break the gridlock, Mr. McCain said, "people that are patriotic Americans need to sit down together and work this out."
"It's clearly an absolute necessity to protect this nation," he said. "Unfortunately, we can't seem to do that."
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David M. Herszenhorn and Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

House Leaves Surveillance Law to Expire
By Carl Hulse
The New York Times
Friday 15 February 2008
Washington - The House broke for a week's recess Thursday without renewing terrorist surveillance authority demanded by President Bush, leading him to warn of risky intelligence gaps while Democrats accused him of reckless fear mongering.
The refusal of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, to schedule a vote on a surveillance measure approved Tuesday by the Senate touched off an intense partisan conflict over the national security questions that have colored federal elections since 2002 and are likely to play a significant role again in November.
Trying to put pressure on Democrats, Mr. Bush offered to delay a trip to Africa to resolve the dispute and warned that failure to extend the expanded power under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires Saturday, could hamper efforts to track terrorists.
"Our intelligence professionals are working day and night to keep us safe," Mr. Bush said, "and they're waiting to see whether Congress will give them the tools they need to succeed or tie their hands by failing to act."
But Ms. Pelosi and other House Democrats said Mr. Bush and Congressional Republicans were at fault because they had resisted temporarily extending the bill to allow disagreements to be worked out. Democrats would not be bullied into approving a measure they considered flawed, she said.
"The president knows full well that he has all the authority he needs to protect the American people," said Ms. Pelosi, who then referred to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's admonition about fearing only fear itself. "President Bush tells the American people that he has nothing to offer but fear, and I'm afraid that his fear-mongering of this bill is not constructive."
The decision by the House Democratic leadership to let the law lapse is the greatest challenge to Mr. Bush on a major national security issue since the Democrats took control of Congress last year.
Last summer, Democrats allowed the surveillance law to be put in place for six months although many of them opposed it. They have also relented in fights over spending on the Iraq war under White House pressure. But with Mr. Bush rated low in public opinion polls as he enters the last months of his presidency, Democrats are showing more willingness to challenge him.
Republicans say House Democrats are taking a risk, especially in light of the strong bipartisan Senate vote for the bill.
"They can't pass a Mother's Day resolution and got 68 votes for this bill," said Representative Adam H. Putnam of Florida, chairman of the House Republican Conference.
The battle over the surveillance bill was also tangled up in the rancor over a House vote to hold in contempt Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff, and Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, for refusing to testify about the firing of United States attorneys. Republicans said the House was devoting time to that issue when it could be considering the surveillance program, and they staged a walkout in protest.
The main sticking point is a provision in the Senate bill that provides legal immunity for telecommunications companies that, at the Bush administration's request, cooperated in providing private data after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Many House Democrats oppose that immunity.
Surveillance efforts will not cease when the law lapses. Administration intelligence officials said agencies would be able to continue eavesdropping on targets that have already been approved for a year after the initial authorization. But they said any new targets would have to go through the more burdensome standards in place before last August, which would require that they establish probable cause that an international target is connected to a terrorist group.
Intelligence officials also told reporters Thursday that they were worried that telecommunications companies would be less willing to cooperate in future wiretapping unless they were given immunity.
Ben Powell, general counsel for the director of national intelligence's office, said some carriers had already asked whether they could be compelled to cooperate even without legal protection, although he indicated that none had actually threatened to halt operations.
Ms. Pelosi said that she believed that the differences could be resolved within three weeks and that she had told the chairmen of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees to work with their counterparts in the Senate to seek a compromise.
Congressional Republicans sharply criticized Democrats for not moving on the final measure.
"I think there is probably joy throughout the terrorist cells throughout the world that the United States Congress did not do its duty today," said Representative Ted Poe, Republican of Texas.
Democrats said Republicans, struggling politically, were trying to create an air of crisis.
"This is a manufactured political crisis," said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat. "They want something to put in front of the American people to take their minds off the state of the economy."
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Eric Lichtblau contributed reporting.