Al Qaeda communications interception disclosure damages US spy efforts

WASHINGTON — As the nation’s spy agencies assess the fallout from disclosures about their surveillance programs, some government analysts and senior officials have made a startling finding: the impact of a leaked terrorist plot by Al Qaeda in August has caused more immediate damage to American counterterrorism efforts than the thousands of classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

Since news reports in early August revealed that the United States intercepted messages between Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of Al Qaeda, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, discussing an imminent terrorist attack, analysts have detected a sharp drop in the terrorists’ use of a major communications channel that the authorities were monitoring. Since August, senior American officials have been scrambling to find new ways to surveil the electronic messages and conversations of Al Qaeda’s leaders and operatives.

“The switches weren’t turned off, but there has been a real decrease in quality” of communications, said one United States official, who like others quoted spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence programs.

The drop in message traffic after the communication intercepts contrasts with what analysts describe as a far more muted impact on counterterrorism efforts from the disclosures by Mr. Snowden of the broad capabilities of N.S.A. surveillance programs. Instead of terrorists moving away from electronic communications after those disclosures, analysts have detected terrorists mainly talking about the information that Mr. Snowden has disclosed.

Senior American officials say that Mr. Snowden’s disclosures have had a broader impact on national security in general, including counterterrorism efforts. This includes fears that Russia and China now have more technical details about the N.S.A. surveillance programs. Diplomatic ties have also been damaged, and among the results was the decision by Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, to postpone a state visit to the United States in protest over revelations that the agency spied on her, her top aides and Brazil’s largest company, the oil giant Petrobras.

The communication intercepts between Mr. Zawahri and Mr. Wuhayshi revealed what American intelligence officials and lawmakers have described as one of the most serious plots against American and other Western interests since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. It prompted the closing of 19 United States Embassies and consulates for a week, when the authorities ultimately concluded that the plot focused on the embassy in Yemen.

McClatchy Newspapers first reported on the conversations between Mr. Zawahri and Mr. Wuhayshi on Aug. 4. Two days before that, The New York Times agreed to withhold the identities of the Qaeda leaders after senior American intelligence officials said the information could jeopardize their operations. After the government became aware of the McClatchy article, it dropped its objections to The Times’s publishing the same information, and the newspaper did so on Aug. 5.

In recent months, senior administration officials — including the director of national intelligence, James Clapper Jr. — have drawn attention to the damage that Mr. Snowden’s revelations have done, though most have been addressing the impact on national security more broadly, not just the effect on counterterrorism.

“We have seen, in response to the Snowden leaks, Al Qaeda and affiliated groups seeking to change their tactics, looking to see what they can learn from what is in the press and seek to change how they communicate to avoid detection,” Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told a security conference in Aspen, Colo., in July.

American counterterrorism officials say they believe the disclosure about the Qaeda plot has had a significant impact because it was a specific event that signaled to terrorists that a main communication network that the group’s leaders were using was being monitored. The sharpest decline in messaging has been among the Qaeda operatives in Yemen, officials said. The disclosures from Mr. Snowden have not had such specificity about terrorist communications networks that the government is monitoring, they said.

“It was something that was immediate, direct and involved specific people on specific communications about specific events,” one senior American official said of the exchange between the Qaeda leaders. “The Snowden stuff is layered and layered, and it will take a lot of time to understand it. There wasn’t a sudden drop-off from it. A lot of these guys think that they are not impacted by it, and it is difficult stuff for them to understand.”

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NSA revelation: Project Minaret -spying on Americans during the Cold War.

 THE GUARDIAN: The National Security Agency secretly tapped into the overseas phone calls of prominent critics of the Vietnam War, including Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali and two actively serving US senators, newly declassified material has revealed.

The NSA has been forced to disclose previously secret passages in its own official four-volume history of its Cold War snooping activities. The newly-released material reveals the breathtaking – and probably illegal – lengths the agency went to in the late 1960s and 70s, in an attempt to try to hold back the rising tide of anti-Vietnam war sentiment.

That included tapping into the phone calls and cable communications of two serving senators – the Idaho Democrat Frank Church and Howard Baker, a Republican from Tennessee who, puzzlingly, was a firm supporter of the war effort in Vietnam. The NSA also intercepted the foreign communications of prominent journalists such as Tom Wicker of the New York Times and the popular satirical writer for the Washington Post, Art Buchwald.

Alongside King, a second leading civil rights figure, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, was also surreptitiously monitored. The heavyweight boxing champion, Muhammad Ali, was put on the watch list in about 1967 after he spoke out about Vietnam – he was jailed having refused to be drafted into the army, was stripped of his title, and banned from fighting – and is thought to have remained a target of surveillancefor the next six years.

The agency went to great lengths to keep its activities, known as operation Minaret, from public view. All reports generated for Minaret were printed on plain paper unadorned with the NSA logo or other identifying markings other than the stamp "For Background Use Only". They were delivered by hand directly to the White House, often going specifically to successive presidents Lyndon Johnson who set the programme up in 1967 and Richard Nixon.

The lack of judicial oversight of the snooping programme led even the NSA's own history to conclude that Minaret was "disreputable if not outright illegal".

The new disclosures were prized from the current NSA following an appeal to the Security Classification Appeals Panel by the National Security Archive, an independent research institute based at the George Washington university. "Clearly the NSA didn't want to release this material but they were forced to do so by the American equivalent of the supreme court of freedom of information law," said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian specialising in the NSA.

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DARPA seeking hypersonic satellite launcher

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 (UPI) -- The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking development of a reusable hypersonic unmanned vehicle for the launch of satellites.

The vehicle -- with operation and reliability similar to traditional aircraft – would lower the cost of launching military satellites, which often costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

"We want to build off of proven technologies to create a reliable, cost-effective space delivery system with one-day turnaround," said Jess Sponable, DARPA program manager heading the development project, which is called XS-1. "How it's configured, how it gets up and how it gets back are pretty much all on the table -- we're looking for the most creative yet practical solutions possible."

The XS-1, or Experimental Spaceplane program, aims for an unmanned vehicle that would allow for daily operations and flights to launch small satellites, without need for specialized infrastructure and with the use of a small number of ground crew, DARPA said.

A reusable first stage would fly to hypersonic speeds at a sub-orbital altitude. One or more expendable upper stages would then separate and deploy a satellite into low Earth orbit.

DARPA has issued a special notice on the program, asking for ideas and proposals for the XS-1 program.

"XS-1 aims to help break the cycle of launches happening farther and farther apart and costing more and more," Sponable said. "It would also help further our progress toward practical hypersonic aircraft technologies and increase opportunities to test new satellite technologies as well."

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2013/09/18/DARPA-seeks-reusable-UAV-for-satellite-launches/UPI-47861379517092/#ixzz2fLAA4G65

15 hospitalized after fire on Russia nuclear submarine

Reuters) - Fifteen seamen were in hospital on Tuesday after a fire on a Russian nuclear submarine, federal investigators said, contradicting earlier reports that nobody was hurt in Monday's blaze.

The fire started during welding works on the navy submarine Tomsk, which was being repaired at the giant Zvezda shipyard near the far eastern city of Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan, military officials said.

The fire was extinguished after about five hours, the state-owned United Shipbuilding Corporation, which operates the shipyard, said in a statement on Monday. It said there were no injuries.

In a report to President Vladimir Putin later on Monday, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu made no mention of injuries.

However, the federal Investigative Committee said on Tuesday the fire had "caused damage to the health of 15 servicemen" and they remained in hospital. It gave no details about their condition.

The Investigative Committee, which answers to Putin, said in a statement it was conducting a criminal investigation into the fire - which is a normal step in Russia after such an incident.

Shoigu told Putin that the missiles the submarines normally carries had been removed in 2009 before the repairs began, and officials said the atomic reactors that power it had been shut off and that there was no radiation leak.

Russia's navy has suffered several fatal accidents since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The nuclear-powered submarine Kursk sank in the Barents Sea in 2000, killing all 118 crewmen aboard, and 20 people died aboard the submarine Nerpa in 2008 when its fire extinguishing system went off, flooding compartments with deadly gas.

(Writing by Steve Gutterman, editing by Elizabeth Piper)

Breaking: Car bomb explodes in Benghazi

CNN) -- A car bomb exploded outside a Foreign Ministry building in the Libyan city of Benghazi Wednesday, state media said, on the anniversary of an assault on the U.S. Consulate there that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

The blast did not cause any casualties but blew away large parts of the building's facade, said Col. Abdullah Al Zaydi, spokesman for the Joint Security Task Force in Benghazi, according to Libya's state news agency, LANA.

Zaydi said the explosion was very powerful and destroyed the vehicle used for the bombing, which contained a large quantity of explosives, the news agency said.

The blast also damaged a branch of the Central Bank of Libya and slightly injured one of its security guards, the bank said.

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