Some of America's biggest social media and tech companies
have been denying in recent days that they were aware of the
National Security Agency's recently-exposed "PRISM" and
telephone monitoring programs. But these denials obscure a
larger truth: The government's massive data collection and
surveillance system was largely built not by professional
spies or Washington bureaucrats but by Silicon Valley and
private defense contractors.
So says Michael V. Hayden, the retired Air Force general
who as director of the NSA from 1999 to 2006 was a primary
mover behind the agency's rebirth from Cold War dinosaur
into a post-9/11 terror-detection leviathan with sometimes
frightening technical and legal powers.
After many false starts, that transformation was achieved
largely by drafting private-sector companies that had far
more technical know-how than did the NSA, and contracting
with them to set up and administer the technical aspects of
these surveillance programs, Hayden told National
Journal in an interview Sunday.
"There isn't a phone or computer at Fort Meade [NSA
headquarters] that the government owns" today, he says.
That doesn't quite square with the popular image of the NSA
as a shadowy confection of Big Brother and Big Government.
Nor with the description of PRISM as merely "an internal
government computer system," as Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper called it over the weekend.
Among these contributing companies reportedly is Palantir
Technologies, the Palo Alto, Calif., company that several
news outlets have identified as a close associate of the
NSA's. Another is Eagle Alliance, a joint venture of
Computer Sciences Corp. and Northrup Grumman that runs the
NSA's IT program and describes itself on its website as "the
Intelligence Community's premier Information Technology
Managed Services provider." ("We made them part of the
team," says Hayden.) Another is Booz Allen Hamilton, the
international consultancy for which the reported
whistleblower in the NSA stories, contractor Edward Snowden,
began working three months ago. In 2002, Booz Allen Hamilton
won a $63 million contract for an early and controversial
version of the current data-mining program, called Total
Information Awareness, which was later cancelled after
congressional Democrats raised questions about invasion of
privacy in the early 2000s. The firm's current
vice-chairman, Mike McConnell, was DNI in the George W. Bush
administration and, before that, director of the NSA.
Clapper is also a former Booz Allen executive.
In its outreach to private industry, the NSA occasionally
overreached. The most notorious example was the $1.2 billion
"Trailblazer" program developed in the early-to-mid-2000s by
SAIC and other companies, which led to the notorious
attempted prosecution of another whistleblower, an NSA
career employee, who sought to expose the program as a
wasteful failure. "One of the things we tried to do with
Trailblazer was to hire out a solution to our problems,"
Hayden says. "It was kind of a moonshot."
Afterwards, Hayden said, "we began to do this in
increments," still employing private-sector firms. "It's the
companies responding to your requests... You look for a
Palantir, and you make them part of our team."
It's questionable whether any of the nine major U.S.
Internet companies named in the PRISM stories were, like
some of these contractors, also willing parts of the NSA
"team." For the tech industry, especially the social-media
companies, the controversy over the extent of the NSA's
domestic data gathering has become an acute embarrassment.
The NSA is said to have tapped into servers of the nine
companies, but the heads of two of the biggest, Facebook
founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Larry Page,
issued near-identical statements late last week saying
neither of them had ever heard "of a program called PRISM"
until the press reports.
Yet for Hayden, who was one of the longest-serving NSA
directors ever, remaking the stodgy Cold War spy agency into
a private-tech-sector enterprise was a logical outgrowth of
dramatic changes in the nature of both threats and
technology.
Well before 9/11, he says, he realized that as the Internet
era was taking off, the NSA was failing in its mission to
collect signals intelligence, or sigint, and effectively
"going deaf," in the critique of the time. Hayden admitted
this, surprisingly, in an open session of the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 2000, telling
the members what he thought needed to happen if the NSA was
going to get in front of the data. "This agency grew up in
the Cold War. We came from the world of ENIGMA [the Nazi
encryption device whose code was broken by the allies], for
God's sakes. There were no privacy concerns in intercepting
German communications to their submarines, or Russian
microwave transmissions to missile bases," he says. "But
now, I told them, all the data you want to go for is
coexisting with your stuff. And the trick then, the only way
NSA succeeds, is to get enough power to be able to reach
that new data but with enough trust to know enough not to
grab your stuff even though it's whizzing right by."
That is still the issue today, Hayden says. And while he
admits that critics have raised some legitimate concerns
about proper monitoring and intrusions into privacy,
inadvertent or not, he believes there are now adequate
safeguards against undue intrusion into citizens' records.
Hayden adds: "If we weren't doing this, there would be holy
hell to raise." He notes that the 2002 joint Senate-House
inquiry into 9/11 criticized the NSA for being "far too
cautious." And as controversial as they might seem, programs
such as PRISM were always intended to resolve the conflict
he had laid out in 2000: how to monitor overseas
conversations that are often routed through servers in the
United States. "This is a home game for us," says Hayden.
"Are we not going to take advantage that so much of it goes
through Redmond, Washington?"
During most of the Cold War, he says, the NSA was the
cutting-edge innovator, helping to create the Internet and
American computer industry back in the 1950s and '60. "We
were America's Information-Age enterprise during America's
Industrial Age. We had the habit of saying if we need it,
we're going to have to build it," Hayden says. "But in the
outside world there was a technological explosion in the two
universes that had been at the birth of the agency almost
uniquely ours: telecommunications and computers."
By the time 9/11 arrived, the American tech industry was
building the best stuff and had the best minds, so the NSA
no longer had any choice but to enlist Silicon Valley's
help. Signals intelligence "has to look like its target. We
have to master whatever technology the target is using to
turn his beeps and squeaks into something humanly
intelligible," Hayden says. Not only was much of this
traffic being routed through the United States, but the tech
sector knew how to penetrate and "mine" it. He concludes:
"Why would we not turn the most powerful telecommunications
and computing management structure on the planet to our
use?"
The NSA did. But now some of these companies may come to
regret what is emerging as a public relations disaster.
