WASHINGTON - As the nation’s spy agencies assess the fallout from disclosures about their surveillance programs, some government analysts and senior officials say that the leak of an al-Qaida terrorist plot in August has caused more immediate damage to U.S. 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-Qaida, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based al-Qaida 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 authorities were monitoring.Since August, senior U.S. officials have been scrambling to find new ways to tap into the electronic messages and conversations of al-Qaida’s leaders and operatives.
“The switches weren’t turned off, but there has been a real decrease in quality” of communications, said one U.S. 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 effect on counterterrorism efforts from the disclosures by Snowden of the broad capabilities of National Security Agency surveillance programs. Instead of terrorists moving away from electronic communications after those disclosures, analysts have detected terrorists mainly talking about the information that Snowden has disclosed.
Senior U.S. officials say that Snowden’s disclosures have had a broader effect on national security in general, including counterterrorism efforts. This includes fears that Russia and China now have more technical details about the National Security Agency surveillance programs, as well as damaged diplomatic ties, like the decision by Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, to postpone a state visit to the United States in protest about revelations that the agency spied on her, her top aides and Brazil’s largest company, the oil giant Petrobras.
The communication intercepts between al-Zawahri and al-Wuhayshi revealed what U.S. intelligence officialsand lawmakers have described as one of the most serious plots against American and Western interests since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. It prompted the closure of 19 U.S. 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 al-Zawahri and al-Wuhayshi on Aug. 4. Two days before that, The New York Times agreed to withhold the identities of the al-Qaida leaders after senior U.S. intelligence officials said the information could jeopardize their operations. After the government became aware of the McClatchy article, it droppedits objections to The Times’ publishing the same information, and the newspaper did so on Aug. 5.
U.S. counterterrorism officials say they think the disclosure about the al-Qaida plot has had a significant effect because it was a specific event that signaled to terrorists that a main communication network the group’s leaders were using was being monitored. The sharpest decline in messaging has been among the al-Qaida operatives in Yemen, officials said. The disclosures from Snowden have not had such specificity about terrorist communications networks that the government is monitoring, they said.
Other senior intelligence and counterterrorism officials offer a dissenting view, saying it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the effect of the messages between the al-Qaida leaders from Snowden’s overall disclosures, and that the decline is more likely a combination the two.
“The bad guys are just not going to talk operational planning electronically,” said one senior counterterrorism official.
Throughout the past decade, the National Security Agency has invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the emails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, according to documents provided by Snowden.
The government’s greatest fear concerning its counterterrorism operations is that during the next several months, the level of intercepted communications will continue to fall as terrorists find new ways to communicate with one another, one senior U.S. official said. It will likely take the government some time to break into that method and monitor communications.
A senior intelligence official put it this way: “They are agile, we are agile. When we see a change in behavior, our guys are changing right along with it, or we’re already seeing it and adapting to it. Our capabilities are changing in hours and days, versus weeks and months like we used to.”
It’s known that al-Qaida leaders and their top lieutenants use other secure electronic communications as well as old-fashioned means - like couriers, as bin Laden did - that pose major challenges to American intelligence services.
In the past few months, the Global Islamic Media Front, the propaganda arm of al-Qaida and other Islamic terrorist groups, has released new software that allows users to encrypt communications for instant messaging and cellphones. Officials say these new programs may pose fresh challenges for National Security Agency code breakers.
Jihadists have been working on camouflaging their communications through encryption software for years.
Al-Qaida’s use of advanced encryption technology dates to 2007, when the Global Islamic Media Front released the Asrar al-Mujahedeen, or so-called “Mujahedeen Secrets” software. An updated version, Mujahedeen Secrets 2, was released in January 2008, and has been revised at least twice, most recently in May 2012, analysts said.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 09/30/2013