Islamic State using leaked Snowden info to evade U.S. intelligence
Islamic State using leaked Snowden info to evade U.S.
intelligence
Disclosures from classified documents help terrorist
group’s militants avoid detection
By Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Thursday,
September 4, 2014
A former top official at the National Security Agency
says the Islamic State terrorist group has "clearly" capitalized on
the voluminous leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and is
exploiting the top-secret disclosures to evade U.S. intelligence.
Bottom line: Islamic State killers are harder to find
because they know how to avoid detection.
Chris Inglis was the NSA's deputy director during Mr.
Snowden's flood of documents to the news media last year. Mr. Snowden disclosed
how the agency eavesdrops, including spying on Internet communications such as
emails and on the Web's ubiquitous social media.
Asked by The Washington Times if the Islamic State has
studied Mr. Snowden's documents and taken action, Mr. Inglis answered,
"Clearly."
The top-secret spill has proven ready-made for the
Islamic State (also referred to as ISIL or ISIS). It relies heavily on Internet
channels to communicate internally and to spread propaganda.
Mr. Snowden "went way beyond disclosing things that
bore on privacy concerns," said Mr. Inglis, who retired in January.
"'Sources and methods' is what we say inside the intelligence community —
the means and methods we use to hold our adversaries at risk, and ISIL is
clearly one of those.
"Having disclosed all of those methods, or at least
some degree of those methods, it would be impossible to imagine that, as
intelligent as they are in the use of technology, in the employment of
communications for their own purposes, it's impossible to imagine that they
wouldn't understand how they might be at risk to intelligence services around
the world, not the least of which is the U.S. And they necessarily do what they
think is in their best interest to defend themselves," he said.
Another former official also bemoans the damage Mr. Snowden
has done.
Retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden ran the NSA when al
Qaeda struck on Sept. 11, 2001. He moved to modernize technology and
methodology in an agency that some internal critics said "had gone
deaf" in the 1990s.
"The changed communications practices and patterns
of terrorist groups following the Snowden revelations have impacted our ability
to track and monitor these groups," said Mr. Hayden, who writes a
bimonthly column for The Times.
Matthew G. Olsen, who directs the National
Counterterrorism Center, supports Mr. Hayden's assessment.
"Following the disclosure of the stolen NSA
documents, terrorists are changing how they communicate to avoid surveillance.
They are moving to more secure communications platforms, using encryption and
avoiding electronic communications altogether," Mr. Olsen, a former NSA
general counsel, said Wednesday at the Brookings Institution. "This is a
problem for us in many areas where we have limited human collection and depend
on intercepted communications to identify and disrupt plots."
A former military official said some Islamic State
operators have virtually disappeared, giving no hint as to their whereabouts or
actions.
Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, an Iraqi
devoted to former al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, is known to practice evasive
tradecraft that undoubtedly improved because of Mr. Snowden's disclosures.
A former military intelligence official said the U.S.
thought it had killed him several times when he was a chieftain in al Qaeda in
Iraq, which morphed into the Islamic State. The U.S. later discovered he had
passed his communication devices to another terrorist whom intelligence
agencies tracked thinking he was the man who then went by the name Abu Dura.
Some of the documents turned over by Mr. Snowden,
principally to Great Britain's The Guardian and to The Washington Post,
provided precise details on how the U.S. tracks an al Qaeda operative.
Thus, officials argue, Islamic State operatives reading
the series of Snowden documents and news stories know what types of
communication to avoid or how to make them more secure.
For example, Mr. Snowden disclosed an NSA report that
told of its involvement in finding and then killing bin Laden confidant Hassan
Ghul in October 2012.
It was Ghul's wife who unwittingly betrayed him by
mentioning her husband's living conditions in an email intercepted by the NSA.
"In Ghul's case, the agency deployed an arsenal of
cyberespionage tools, secretly seizing control of laptops, siphoning audio
files and other messages and tracking radio transmissions to determine where
Ghul might 'bed down,'" The Post said, based on Mr. Snowden's collection.
A Senate defense committee staffer said Thursday:
"Our lax security has provided our adversaries with a gold mine of
information about our tactics and procedures."
Mr. Snowden's leaks came in 2013 before the Islamic State
became widely known as a vicious terrorist group and army rolled into one,
determined to attack America. In June it rampaged through Iraq, brutally
conquering territory, and recently beheaded two American journalists.
Today a fugitive from U.S. justice in Russia, Mr. Snowden
won sympathy from liberals, libertarians and some conservatives for exposing
the NSA's mass collection of communications to spy on enemies and allies alike.
Now that the U.S. has a new and especially vicious enemy,
the Islamic State may sway some Snowden supporters to take a second look.
What angers intelligence officials is that Mr. Snowden
claims to be an activist and reformer on the issue of privacy, yet he exposed
basic spying techniques for finding terrorists who want to kill Americans.
"Snowden's original pretext that we were violating
the law or that we were doing things that were simply inappropriate — the
spirit or the letter of the law — has not been borne out," said Mr.
Inglis. "He went way beyond disclosing things that bore on privacy
concerns."
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