If I Had a Hammer

                  “If I had a hammer……….”

                                     By Marco M. Pardi

In 1963 Peter, Paul and Mary emerged onto the folk music scene with a song by this title.  They vowed to hammer out warning, danger, justice, and love.  By just a few years they preceded national concerns over military contracting procedures through which items, such as $5.00 hammers were routinely purchased for upwards of $175.00 each (1960’s dollars). But was – and is, the military really this stupid?

Implementation of military procurement procedures normally follows strict protocol.  This is tedious, and about as interesting as dried wallpaper paste. Nonetheless, hammers were bought at stunning mark-ups, as were many other items.  Re-election nervous politicians and vapid journalists hammered out claims and stories.  Details, and especially reasons, were often deemed too arcane for a public shifting from the “Who, what, where, why and when” of traditional journalism to the evolving organism we have come to know as “television sound bite”.  And, history is a casualty of expedience.

Today, the American defense inventory includes 16 intelligence agencies.  Most of the public is unaware of this number; they are not all regularly featured in “spy movies”.  The American public is also largely unaware of how these entities are funded, perhaps casually dismissing that housekeeping chore as just more line items on the daunting Federal Budget document that threatens hernia to anyone foolish enough to try “picking up a copy”.  The interesting part of this is that the budgets for the established major players, such as CIA and NSA are simply not to be found in any open access documents.  The budgets for the other agencies are safely buried within the much larger overall budget documents relating to the services or departments of which they are a part.  One would have to know the budget code in order to perform the micro-surgical excision of those numbers from the body of the budget as a whole.

The budgets for the CIA and the NSA have been heavily classified from the start.  The reasons for this are simple and straightforward, no games are being played on the American taxpayers. If budgets were publically disclosed analysts in hostile agencies could readily parse out very reliable staffing and operational capability estimates.

It might be instructive to note that, only since the advent of the U-2, the SR71, and various satellites has the United States been able to compete for even rudimentary intelligence information. For example, up through the 1950’s anyone with a few dollars could easily acquire area maps of the United States, including geological survey maps, aviation maps, nautical maps, railway maps, and common road maps.  Most of these maps clearly delineated restricted zones, often with an explanatory legend. At the same time, even simple road maps were not publically available in the Soviet Union. If you did not know where you were going, you did not go – even if you could acquire the internal travel permits to do so.  Contrast the few dollars in the U.S., no questions asked, to the tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars required to obtain similar information through HUMINT (Human Intelligence) from inside the Soviet Union.

The research and development costs of aircraft and satellite systems were funded from various classified sources, including the agencies which would use them.  And how did the money migrate from the taxpayer to the accounts from which this R&D money was drawn?  $175.00 hammers, and other such items ordered by the thousand.  The publically available line item disclosed the taxpayer cost, not the amount going to the hammer store. A chain of intermediaries drew “overhead costs” as the requisition made its way to the purchase officer in contact with the hammer provider. This isn’t to say the provider always and only got the normal wholesale (or perhaps retail) dollar amount Joe the Carpenter would have paid. But it is to say the provider never saw anything like $175.00 for a $5.00 hammer. The overhead costs were merely ways to siphon off funds into “black budgets”.

Another broad and misunderstood cost area has to do with operations, but not the operations many people envision when this term is used.  The public mind seems almost entirely engaged with the information gathering side of intelligence work, the so-called “spying”.  There seems to be no understanding that a complete intelligence program is as much devoted to shaping opinion as it is to gathering opinion.  Pursuant to this mission, operational costs mount as foreign journalists, politicians, entertainers and community activists are recruited,  front businesses are opened and staffed, and various academic institutions, non-profit charities, non governmental organizations, and country liaison offices are enlisted and/or opened.  Intelligence “community” insiders only half joke when they refer to USAID (United States Agency for International Development) as “a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA”.  Indeed, the agency owns and funds a large variety of activities around the world.  However,  what is true for the American agencies/activities, often operating in frankly hostile and often costly environments, is even more true for the hostile intelligence services operating at a fraction of the cost in the almost Utopian openness of the domestic American landscape.

Enter the Counter-Intelligence divisions of the various American agencies. Although it may sound exotic and dramatic, counter-intelligence, particularly before the advent of the technology cited earlier, was and is often a plodding, methodical and tedious process of determining and investigating a number of factors.  It is also one of the least understood and least appreciated aspects of intelligence work, leading to accusations of “witch hunt”, paranoia, and over reach in the areas of privacy. It is the process of identifying and thwarting attempts by hostile services to gather intelligence.  As such, it must by its mission examine all possible points of entry into American society and the institutions through which that society functions and preserves itself.

While terrorism has been much of the American focus, particularly since 9/11, societal conflict is potential or actual along several fronts. These mainly are: Military; economic; political; and, infra-structural. Infra-structural here refers to the greatly increasing points of entry and vulnerability of societal fundamentals such as the electric and natural gas power grid/routing system, the electronic banking system, and all forms of electrically coordinated transportation systems.  But of course, all of the fronts are dynamically inter-related.  Bombs at marathons are certainly tragic and initially confusing. But they are localized.  However, access to any substantial electronic portal could be broadly disastrous and result in widespread major casualties and dramatic change in American life. 

Do electronic intrusions work?  One word: Stuxnet. Readers may recall the self-destruction of over 1,000 centrifuge tubes in the nuclear facility in Iran. The computer based controls went haywire and the tubes spun out of control. The culprit turned out to be a computer worm now known as Stuxnet. No one admits to authoring this worm, but examination disclosed a crucial problem: the in-built TTL (Time To Live) function failed to auto-destruct the worm after it had done its job.  A TTL function can easily be visualized in the same way as a telomere, a region of repetitive nucleotide sequences at each end of a chromatid, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration. As the telomere ages it shortens, eventually triggering a function similar to cell apoptosis.

Since the TTL failed, the Stuxnet worm has been available to unknown numbers of computer experts around the world who can tweak it with logic bombs, trapdoors and Trojan Horses pre-set to trigger on command. Thousands of probes daily seek breaches in American computer systems and networks, many probably looking for an entry point for a modified Stuxnet variant. These probes originate from overseas and from inside the U.S.      

The rapid growth of electronic technology to detect intrusion attempts has so far been successful in identifying and stopping incoming electronic attempts to penetrate and affect the fundamental systems mentioned. Attempts to protect commercial, military, and political secrets have not proven as successful.  However, in the methods to counter intelligence efforts and to “harden” electronically vulnerable targets, many factors must be considered. These include, but are not limited to:

1. Human reliability.

2. Likely targets, including vulnerable people.

3. Target vulnerability.

4. Cost – benefit analysis of risk mitigation.

5. Containment and First Responder capability.

6. Ability to identify a “return address”.

And many more. All of these are regularly “gamed” in spontaneous drills and exercises.  The operant caveat throughout the system is, “We have to succeed all the time; they only have to succeed once.”

The hyperbole, the anguished expressions, and the solemn but outraged tones passing for commentary about recent disclosures of intelligence methods glaringly announce that the sources of this consternation and angst have lots of internal empty space with which to amplify their cries.  Several fine histories have been written about the two stand-alone agencies mentioned above.  None have been widely read; fantasy feeding fiction (“spy thriller” is an actual name for the genre) prevails on the best seller lists.  A select few of the histories closely examine the in-fighting and seemingly interminable philosophical battles waged within the agencies and with the administrations to whom they answered; these are books a Constitutional Scholar would love.  

Yet, with all that has been published within a highly lucrative genre of spy thrillers, there seems to have been no discussion of the legal basis upon which “spy actions” rest. The 1978 Supreme Court case, United   States v. Choate ruled that the Postal Service may record “mail cover” – the to and from addresses on the outside of the envelope (not the contents) and hold that information.  Having been handed into the Public Domain, the sender surrenders all right to the information in the same way that all right to privacy is surrendered in putting your garbage out on the curb (public street).

The 1979 Supreme Court case, Smith v. Maryland established the same point regarding telephone calls (and, by extension other forms of electronic communication carried or transmitted over public airways or telephone company lines and facilities). All to and from identifiers may be kept by the carrier; content is open only subject to court order.

Our intelligence services work 24/7 in concert with allied services around the globe. Various forms of intelligence can be collated to identify communications nodes which, if demonstrably active in the context of a significant event or in the use of a suspected terrorist or hostile service, should immediately bear scrutiny to determine the extent of the metastasis, no matter where it reaches. As these ganglia are being traced, information sufficient for a warrant presentable to the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court is assembled. At every step along the way internal affairs officers and inspector general staff oversee the process and demand the logic.

All of this supposed conflict and concern seems to be recent, “post 9/11”, arising from the “Patriot Act”, etc.  The fact is, there’s nothing new here. In 1928 then Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson closed the State Department code breaker office saying, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Historians have argued the significance for later events, but the underlying issue of secrecy in a free society never went away. One of the key texts, and required reading for Intelligence Officers ascending beyond mid-management was published in 1985. Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition by Admiral Stansfield Turner, DCI (Director Central Intelligence) 1977-1981.

Many people may lay it aside after a few pages. There are no “shoot-’em-ups” in it. And, it asks people to think first and feel later, unlike the egregious ethics displayed by the Administration in office during 9/11.

The problems are real. The problems are now. But they are not the problems career hungry journalists are touting. They are the problems which arise from unreliable people, hired as outsourced contract labor, slipping into positions which afford them opportunities to gather and then disseminate information which puts all of us at great risk.

The journalists have so far been silent, as they were in the Valerie Plame case, on the likelihood of cooperating human casualties around the globe as hostile services hunt and purge through their ranks for anyone seen to have allowed the penetrations that one person named Snowden claimed to have happened.

If I had a hammer, I’d hammer the Snowdens and others of his ilk out of positions in which poorly vetted technicians can allow poorly informed personal opinions to do great harm to the integrity of professionals and to the safety of the country at large.