The German magazine
Der Spiegel says the U.S. National
Security Agency secretly monitored the U.N.’s internal video
conferencing system by decrypting it last year.
The weekly said Sunday that documents it obtained from American
leaker Edward Snowden show the NSA decoded the system at the UN’s
headquarters in New York last summer.
Quoting leaked NSA documents, the article said the decryption
“dramatically increased the data from video phone conferences and the
ability to decode the data traffic.”
AP Photo/The Guardian, FileEdward Snowden, who worked as a contract employee at the U.S. National Security Agency, in Hong Kong.
In three weeks,
Der Spiegel said, the NSA increased the number of decrypted communications at the UN from 12 to 458.
Snowden’s leaks have exposed details of the United States’ global
surveillance apparatus, sparking an international debate over the limits
of American spying.
The U.S. government’s efforts to determine which highly classified
materials the leaker took from the National Security Agency have been
frustrated by Snowden’s sophisticated efforts to cover his digital trail
by deleting or bypassing electronic logs, government officials told The
Associated Press. Such logs would have showed what information Snowden
viewed or downloaded.
The government’s forensic investigation is wrestling with Snowden’s
apparent ability to defeat safeguards established to monitor and deter
people looking at information without proper permission, said the
officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t
authorized to discuss the sensitive developments publicly.
The disclosure undermines the Obama administration’s assurances to
Congress and the public that the NSA surveillance programs can’t be
abused because its spying systems are so aggressively monitored and
audited for oversight purposes: If Snowden could defeat the NSA’s own
tripwires and internal burglar alarms, how many other employees or
contractors could do the same?
In July, nearly two months after Snowden’s earliest disclosures, NSA
Director Keith Alexander declined to say whether he had a good idea of
what Snowden had downloaded or how many NSA files Snowden had taken with
him, noting an ongoing criminal investigation.
SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty ImagesThe
National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, as
seen from the air, in this January 29, 2010 file photo. The NSA has
said that it destroys all data it isn't supposed to see.
NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines told the AP that Alexander “had a sense
of what documents and information had been taken,” but “he did not say
the comprehensive investigation had been completed.” Vines would not say
whether Snowden had found a way to view and download the documents he
took without the NSA knowing.
In defending the NSA surveillance programs that Snowden revealed,
Deputy Attorney General James Cole told Congress last month that the
administration effectively monitors the activities of employees using
them.
These decisions are made to make sure that nobody has done the things that you’re concerned about happening
“This program goes under careful audit,” Cole said. “Everything that
is done under it is documented and reviewed before the decision is made
and reviewed again after these decisions are made to make sure that
nobody has done the things that you’re concerned about happening.”
The disclosure of Snowden’s hacking prowess inside the NSA also could
dramatically increase the perceived value of his knowledge to foreign
governments, which would presumably be eager to learn any
counter-detection techniques that could be exploited against U.S.
government networks.
It also helps explain the recent seizure in Britain of digital files belonging to David Miranda – the partner of
Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald – in an effort to help quantify Snowden’s leak of classified material to the
Guardian
newspaper. Authorities there stopped Miranda last weekend as he changed
planes at Heathrow Airport while returning home to Brazil from Germany,
where Miranda had met with Laura Poitras, a U.S. filmmaker who has
worked with Greenwald on the NSA story.
Marcelo Piu/AFP/Getty ImagesDavid
Miranda (left), the Brazilian partner of Glenn Greenwald, a U.S.
journalist with Britain's Guardian newspaper who worked with
intelligence leaker Edward Snowden to expose US mass surveillance
programmes, is pictured at Rio de Janeiro's Tom Jobim international
airport upon his arrival on August 19, 2013. British authorities faced a
furore after they held Miranda for almost nine hours under anti-terror
laws as he passed through London's Heathrow Airport on his way home to
Rio de Janeiro from Berlin.
Snowden, a former U.S. intelligence contractor, was employed by Booz
Allen Hamilton in Hawaii before leaking classified documents to the
Guardian and
The Washington Post.
As a system administrator, Snowden had the ability to move around data
and had access to thumb drives that would have allowed him to transfer
information to computers outside the NSA’s secure system, Alexander has
said.
In his job, Snowden purloined many files, including ones that
detailed the U.S. government’s programs to collect the metadata of phone
calls of U.S. citizens and copy Internet traffic as it enters and
leaves the U.S., then routes it to the NSA for analysis.
Officials have said Snowden had access to many documents but didn’t
know necessarily how the programs functioned. He dipped into
compartmentalized files as systems administrator and took what he
wanted. He managed to do so for months without getting caught. In May,
he flew to Hong Kong and eventually made his way to Russia, where that
government has granted him asylum.
NBC News reported Thursday that the NSA was “overwhelmed” in trying
to figure what Snowden had stolen and didn’t know everything he had
downloaded.
Insider threats have troubled the administration and Congress,
particularly in the wake of Bradley Manning, a young soldier who decided
to leak hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents in late 2009 and
early 2010.
Congress had wanted to address the insider threat problem in the 2010
Intelligence Authorization Act, but the White House asked for the
language to be removed because of concerns about successfully meeting a
deadline. In the 2013 version, Congress included language urging the
creation of an automated, insider-threat detection program.
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