http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarni...ling_able_.html


William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security
Disabling Able Danger
In April 2000, Able Danger, only months old, was abruptly shut down. Caught violating Reagan administration Executive Orders and Defense Department and Army regulations restricting intelligence agencies from collecting information on United States "persons," the highly compartmented cell within the Army's Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) was halted in its effort to use data mining and link analysis to characterize the worldwide nature of the al Qaeda terrorist network.

Anthony Shaffer, the whistle blower who went public in August, claims lawyers shut down the operation just at the point that it named and identified 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta.

As I wrote yesterday, Shaffer is pretty lonely in his recollections. Of some 80 people interviewed by the Defense Department as part of its Able Danger internal investigation, the Pentagon says that three additional workers remember seeing either a chart with a photo or a reference to Mohamed Atta.

The general in charge of the Special Operations Command, Gen. Bryan "Doug" Brown, also went on the record this weekend telling the St. Petersburg Times that he was "pretty sure" Able Danger did not identify Mohamed Atta before 9/11.

Two Defense Department lawyers familiar with the case told me that there is no evidence that lawyers directed the destruction of information nor restricted any sharing of useful intelligence with the FBI, as Shaffer claims.

The real story here is how another renegade intelligence effort subsisting on hyper secrecy ran afoul of regulations first implemented in the Ford administration when U.S. intelligence agencies were caught collecting information on community, religious and labor leaders, civil rights protestors, and anti-Vietnam war demonstrators.

"What began as a force protection mission for DOD organizations, evolved, through mission creep, lack of clear rules, and the lack of meaningful oversight, into an abuse of … Constitutional rights…," William Dugan, Pentagon chief of intelligence oversight, said last week. He was describing the experiences of the 1960s and 1970s.

Shaffer and others use words like "out-of-the-box" and "entrepreneurial" to describe the LIWA intelligence collection. The buzz words suggest, of course, that other intelligence efforts were in-the-box and boring, that only the LIWA and other compartmented workers were motivated and insightful enough to take chances, that if the lawyers and the bureaucrats and the Clintonistas and the other villains had just gotten out of the way, there would have been no 9/11. If only…

But in 2000, the problem was also a pretty simple one: An off-the-books intelligence effort once again abused the "force protection" justification to collect information on Americans. Military commanders, mindful of the law and regulations, shut down the operation.

When Able Danger approached LIWA in 1999 to help with the al Qaeda campaign plan, the organization was already involved in a number of highly classified counter-terrorism data mining efforts. LIWA's al Qaeda project collected 2.5 terabytes of "open source" information, Shaffer says, a ridiculously immense amount of data equivalent to 500 million pages of text or a pile of paper 30,000 miles high if it were all printed out -- court records, news databases, credit card and telephone records. "Anything we could get our hands on," says Shaffer.

"Open source" here means unclassified information, that is, information that has not been collected and compiled by U.S. intelligence, for example, intelligence information derived from electronic eavesdropping or human agents that the United States classifies at birth.

However, the open source label tends to hide the real problem the Able Danger sponsored effort ran into.

"They were not only using advanced data mining technology, they were also looking at data that no one else was looking at," Shaffer says.

According to military sources familiar with the Able Danger legal side, the effort stepped over the line when LIWA contractors purchased photographic collections of people entering and exiting mosques in the United States and overseas. One source says that LIWA contractors dealt with a questionable source of photographs in California, either a white supremacy group or some other anti-Islamic organization.

"There are records of who goes where regarding visits to mosques," Shaffer told Government Security News. "That was the data that LIWA was buying off the Internet from information brokers." It was stuff no one else bothered to look at, says Shaffer.

LIWA purchased an open-source, six-month data run, Shaffer says, and analysts developed a set of eight data points common to 1993 World Trade Center bombers and associates. With advanced software, including facial recognition software able to track individuals from the collected photographs, Shaffer says contractors "made the link between [Mohammed] Atta and [Sheik Omar Abdel] Rahman, the first World Trade Center bomber."

Thomas Gandy, Army Director of Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence, said at the September 1 Pentagon briefing that the problem with LIWA’s work was that "it was a gobbling up of a lot of data from a lot of sources and put (it) in one pile." Thus there was a "commingling of U.S. person data" with other data. The contractors and software specialists did not take precautions to tag data from different sources or to segregate information about wholly innocent Americans of Islamic faith from others who were not US persons.

Gandy says "there was no perceived imminent threat" or "imminent crime going to occur" that might have justified retention of the gigantic database. Under the regulations, LIWA could have argued that it indeed was on to something and sought justification to continue, but the truth seems to be that while LIWA workers and contractor might have seen what there were doing as actual detective work to uncover terrorists, Able Danger and SOCOM saw the project mostly as an experiment to prove the usefulness of the technology.

So just months after LIWA began its seat-of-the-pants effort, it was directed to destroy its 2.5 terabytes.

(Tomorrow: The Law Takes Hold)

Note to readers: In my original posting, I used the spelling "Mohammed" that readers latched onto as some perhaps some kind of conspiracy on my part. It was an error to spell Atta's name different than he did in his visa applications and on his Florida drivers license. Though I hesitate to quote the 911 Commission's spelling as so many readers think that is a conspiracy as well. According to the Wikipedia entry, Atta used "several aliases and alternate spellings, including Mehan Atta, Mohammed Atta, Mohammad El Amir, Mohamed El Sayed, Muhammad Muhammad Al Amir Awag Al Sayyid Atta, and Muhammad Muhammad Al-Amir Awad Al Sayad. The will that he allegedly wrote in 1996 gives his name as 'Mohamed Mohamed Elamir Awad Elsayed.'"

I did a LexisNexis search of the last 90 days of news to check the prevailing spelling. There were 482 hits for "Mohammed Atta" and 528 for "Mohamed Atta." The Washington Post convention is Mohamed Atta.

By William M. Arkin | September 28, 2005; 08:27 AM ET | Category: Intelligence
Previous: The Secret History of Able Danger | Main Index | Next: Another Law Under Assault

TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/3265557

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Disabling Able Danger:

» Early Warning (ABLE DANGER) from Voice of the Taciturn
William Arkin tackles ABLE DANGER. Multi-part series. Probably going to be one of the better reviews of whole shebang. [Read More]

Tracked on Sep 28, 2005 10:38:26 AM

» Able Danger and Arkin: Day Two from Decision '08
The second installment of William Arkins Able Danger overview is up, and Im beginning to feel a little duped (again!). Arkin plays the role of the apologist pretty much through and through this installment and takes for granted conclusi... [Read More]

Tracked on Sep 28, 2005 1:54:24 PM

» Able Danger Getting Curiouser and Curiouser from Tapscott's Copy Desk
JustOneMinute also links to this essential Decision 08 post on that very curious "Early Warning" Able Danger series now running in The Washington Post by William Arkin. [Read More]

Tracked on Sep 29, 2005 6:57:17 AM