I guess this is the Intelligence Community’s way of arguing that they need these massive capabilities in order to keep us safe. If it seems kind of high-school to be garbling al-Qaeda’s newsletters, it does open up an interesting debate. One part of the debate is about capabilities and the other is about strategy. Let’s look at the capabilities:
“You can make it hard for them to distribute it, or you can mess with the content. And you can mess with the content in a way that is obvious or in ways that are not obvious,” said one intelligence official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal debates…
…Although techniques are carefully guarded, officials said U.S. intelligence operatives have monitored the magazine during its production process through overseas computer networks. Each time an issue is about to hit the Internet, officials from the NSA, CIA, Pentagon, State Department and Justice Department debate whether to sabotage it.
In cases where threats appear imminent, steps might be taken to disrupt publication. In some cases, cyber-spies sabotage files so that they come up blank when a user clicks on them, according to the former official. In one case, the official said, the sabotage was not corrected for months.
Sometimes, the disruption occurs when the magazine is being put together, intelligence officials said. An U.S. operator might alter a technical point in a set of bomb-making instructions so the device will not work. The sabotage could go unnoticed for a long time, an official said.
That sounds like verification that the NSA can “can watch you form ideas as you type,” as Edward Snowden alleged.
It raises another question for me, which is how they could be able to watch these folks assemble their newsletter and not know exactly where they are. We’ve had an active drone program in Yemen for years, and we’ve used it to kill some of the people who make this newsletter. It seems odd that we would reword their recipe for a bomb rather than drop a bomb. I am not even endorsing our drone program; I’m trying to understand how this story fits in the context of our known policies.
On the First Amendment issue, I am a bit confused about that, too. Terrorists don’t have a Constitutional right to publish incitements to kill people or blueprints for implements of mass destruction.
In any case, I don’t think monkeying with their newsletter is going to fix the problem, nor do I think droning people will fix the problem. It’s not that they should ignore the people who make this newsletter, but lessoning the threat of terrorism is going to involve a much broader and longer-term reassessment of foreign policy priorities.