The White House and the intelligence community should...
The White House and the intelligence community should make a better case for its surveillance activities, argued Bruce Riedel, director of the Brookings Intelligence Project and former CIA official. National Security Agency surveillance success is exemplified in the September 2009…
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foiled New York City subway bombing plot of Najibullah Zazi, a case frequently cited among intelligence officials, Riedel said Thursday at an event hosted by the Brookings Institution. “As a citizen, I think we need more transparency about how this program has worked in the past.” But, Matt Apuzzo, a reporter who authored a new book about the foiled plot, disputes that the Zazi case justifies bulk collection of any data by the government. “It in no way says this is why we need Prism,” Apuzzo said. “This is not the case that proves that [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section] 702 and Prism are necessary.” He called framing the foiled plot that way “a stretch.” Zazi is an Afghan American who admitted coordinating with al Qaeda to bomb the New York City subway, and the NSA intercepted an email he sent to a “go-between” in Pakistan when asking about bomb instructions, Apuzzo said. That interception was “the moment,” allowing for authorities to foil the plot, he said: “You can’t crack this case without being up on the email address.” But that “go-between” was already the subject of a investigation in the U.K. and in coordination with the FBI, with the email address known from that investigation, according to Apuzzo. Intelligence officials, in light of recent surveillance leaks, “repeatedly came back to the Zazi case,” he said, indicating they're “not being totally honest with us.” The number of plots foiled by the government’s surveillance practices has been hotly disputed in recent months. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., pressed officials to admit that fewer plots had actually been foiled than they had touted when questioned at an Oct. 2 hearing. Government agencies “would have been up on that email address anyway” due to the former British investigation, totally unrelated to the bulk collections of Prism, Apuzzo said. Riedel expressed amazement at the level of access achieved by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked a “mother load” of documents about the activities -- “I never saw the [intelligence agency black] budget,” he said. “This guy had the whole budget.”