Defenders of the American government’s online spying program known
as “PRISM” claimed Friday that the suddenly controversial secret effort
had saved New York City’s subways from a 2009 terrorist plot led by a
young Afghan-American, Najibullah Zazi.
But British and American
legal documents from 2010 and 2011 contradict that claim, which appears
to be the latest in a long line of attempts to defend secret programs by
making, at best, misleading claims that they were central to stopping
terror plots. While the court documents don’t exclude the possibility
that PRISM was somehow employed in the Zazi case, the documents show
that old-fashioned police work, not data mining, was the tool that led
counterterrorism agents to arrest Zazi. The public documents confirm
doubts raised by
the blogger Marcy Wheeler and the
AP’s Adam Goldman,
and call into question a defense of PRISM first floated by House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, who suggested that PRISM
had stopped a key terror plot.
Reuters’s Mark Hosenball advanced the claim Friday, based on anonymous “government sources”:
A
secret U.S. intelligence program to collect emails that is at the heart
of an uproar over government surveillance helped foil an Islamist
militant plot to bomb the New York City subway system in 2009, U.S.
government sources said on Friday.
The sources said Representative
Mike Rogers, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence
Committee, was talking about a plot hatched by Najibullah Zazi, an
Afghan-born U.S. resident, when he said on Thursday that such
surveillance had helped thwart a significant terrorist plot in recent
years.
President Barack Obama’s administration is facing
controversy after revelations of details of massive programs run by the
National Security Agency for collecting information from telephone and
Internet companies.
The surveillance program that halted the Zazi
plot was one that collected email data on foreign intelligence suspects,
a U.S. government source said.
The
New York Times also emphasized the Zazi case Friday:
To
defenders of the N.S.A., the Zazi case underscores how the agency’s
Internet surveillance system, called Prism, which was set up over the
past decade to collect data from online providers of e-mail and chat
services, has yielded concrete results.
“We were able to glean
critical information,” said a senior intelligence official, who spoke on
the condition of anonymity. “It was through an e-mail correspondence
that we had access to only through Prism.”
But public
— though not widely publicized — details of the Zazi plot cast into
doubt the notion that a data mining program had much to do with the
investigation. Zazi traveled to Pakistan in 2008 to train with al Qaeda.
He was charged in 2009 with leading two other men in a plot to detonate
suicide bombs in the New York subways.
The path to his capture,
according to the public records, began in April 2009, when British
authorities arrested several suspected terrorists.
According to a 2010 ruling
from Britain’s Special Immigration Appeals Commission, one of the
suspects’ computers included email correspondence with an address in
Pakistan.
The open case is founded upon a series of
emails exchanged between a Pakistani registered email account
sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com and an email account admittedly used by Naseer
humaonion@yahoo.com between 30 November 2008 and 3 April 2009. The
Security Service’s assessment is that the user of the sana_pakhtana
account was an Al Qaeda associate…”
“For reasons
which are wholly set out in the closed judgment, we are sure satisfied
to the criminal standard that the user of the sana_pakhtana account was
an Al Qaeda associate,” the British court wrote.
Later that year, according to
a transcript of Zazi’s July, 2011 trial,
Zazi emailed his al Qaeda handler in Pakistan for help with the recipe
for his bombs. He sent his inquiry to the same email address:
sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com.
An FBI agent, Eric Jurgenson, testified,
“I was notified, I should say. My office was in receipt of several
e-mail messages, e-mail communications.” Those emails — from Zazi to the
same sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com — “led to the investigation,” he
testified.
The details of terror investigations are not always
laid out this clearly in public; but they appear to belie the notion,
advanced by anonymous government officials Friday, that sweeping access
to millions of email accounts played an important roil in foiling the
subway attack. Instead, this is the sort investigation made possible by
ordinary warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act;
authorities appear simply to have been monitoring the Pakistani email
account that had been linked to terrorists earlier that year.
This was, in fact, reported at the time. That November,
British authorities were bragging to the Telegraph about their role in arresting Zazi:
The
plan, which reportedly would have been the biggest attack on America
since 9/11, was uncovered after Scotland Yard intercepted an email….The
alleged plot was unmasked after an email address that was being
monitored as part of [the 2009 U.K. case] was suddenly reactivated.
The existence of PRISM was revealed Thursday by the
Washington Post and the
Guardian. Authorities are now scrambling to justify the program.
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