Ars Technica Report: NSA surveillance program too secret for its own good

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

I've written extensively on the many basic problems that make all government-run, computer-automated mass surveillance programs a waste of taxpayer money. But a new report (PDF) from the Offices of Inspectors General of the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, CIA, NSA, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence shows in some detail how our government took the bad idea of building powerful computers to sniff out a terrorist needle in a digital haystack, then made it even less useful in practice.

The new OIG report on the NSA-run Presidential Surveillance Program (PSP), of which the previously revealed warrantless wiretapping program was just a part, contains a number of stunning revelations; I'll go through some of those in subsequent articles. But perhaps the report's greatest value is in the way that it provides a glimpse into how the secrecy-obsessed Bush administration actually sabotaged the NSA's massive, law-free surveillance program by overly restricting intelligence personnel's knowledge of and access to it. In short, the PSP was too secret for its own good.

A throat so deep

One of the pervading themes of the OIG report is that the PSP was really, really, really secret. It was so secret, in fact, that the president himself picked which non-operational personnel were to be "read into" the program. So if you weren't actually involved in the day-to-day running of the NSA's giant SIGINT vacuum, then the commander-in-chief personally decided whether you should know that it even existed.

This extreme level of secrecy posed myriad practical problems when it came to actually using the PSP's output in the day-to-day counter-terror work that goes on at a number of agencies—DHS, CIA, FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and so on. Almost none of the working-level analysts who might benefit from the PSP's output were allowed to know of the program's existence, so getting that output into those workers' hands meant carefully stripping it of any hints about its provenance, thereby rendering it significantly less valuable.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/nsa-program-too-secret.ars

[leveymg]

1. PSP reminds me of the super-secret Soviet doomsday device in Dr. Strangelove. So secret that

it's existence served no rational purpose - the effect of which was to guarantee the destruction of the world.

The President's Surveillance Program is the kind of thing that the good Doctor, himself, might have thought up.