It was preventable, this whole disaster could have been prevented, the fact that the CIA knew about the risk of a terrorist attack on American soil is amply documented, all the top government officials including the President of the United States knew about it, but absolutely nothing was done. In December 1998 a CIA report reaches Bill Clinton reporting bin Laden's plans to carry out further attacks, including the hijacking of American planes to force the government to release its captured associates. In April 2001, the leader of an anti-Taliban militia operating in northern Afghanistan, Ahmad Massoud, in a speech in Brussels, stated categorically that a large-scale attack on American territory was being planned, but he admitted that he had little information to about it.
In May 2001 a CIA report arrives at George Bush's desk reporting the presence of potential terrorists on American soil, a few weeks later, in June, another report stated that possible attacks were imminent. Government officials considered these reports a gross exaggeration, the Pentagon claimed that the CIA was being deceived, and that these rumors surrounding Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were merely distractions, to distract the US government from Saddam Hussein, they disregarded the possibility of an attack taking place in mainland America. The CIA countered by saying that the possibility of an Islamic fundamentalist like Bin Laden cooperating with a secular ruler like Saddam was, to say the least, absurd.
And for the next few weeks as the CIA tried to alert the White House to this attack, Agency Director George Tenet and his Head of Counterterrorism Cofer Black, disagreed about the risk of a terrorist attack perpetrated by bin Laden, Black argued that the information obtained was too fragmented, making it very difficult to build a solid case. Yet they agreed to go to the White House in person to discuss this matter, it was July 10, 2001, two months before the 9/11 attacks. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ignored these warnings, the CIA demanded an affirmative counterterrorism policy and presidential authorization for the agency to take drastic measures in the hunt for bin Laden.
But that did not happen, even after the assurance given by the NSA, after the interception of al-Qaida communications that bin Laden's threats were real, the White House paid no attention to intelligence. The focus of Rice's foreign policy was on building the ballistic missile defense system, which was part of Bush's presidential campaign the year before, fighting terrorism was not the administration's priority. On August 6, 2001, a new report arrives in the hands of George Bush, which summarizes all the continuous threats carried out by Al Qaeda since 1998, concluding with information obtained by the FBI, regarding suspicious movements in American territory, including preparations for plane hijacking.
Just over a month after the 9/11 attacks occurred, and the White House's response was that they had not been alerted to a potential terrorist attack, Rice went even further, saying that the August 6, 2001, report did not detail any specific attack, he did not point to the possibility of an attack that would use planes as missiles. The incompetence of the White House to work with this information obtained by the CIA is the source of numerous conspiracy theories, which is totally justified, it is absurd what happened in those years before the attack. It is natural that people need to find logical reasons for disasters of this magnitude, but the reality is much worse than any theory, the reason for the incompetence of the White House is purely political, its objectives were different and Islamic terrorism was still something far from the On the other side of the Atlantic, an attack on American soil was unthinkable for all branches of government, except of course, for intelligence.
And even though the intelligence community at that point was already extremely powerful, the resources it was asking for to fight this Islamic terrorism were gigantic, and it's in the nature of the American to question their government's spending, they fought a revolution for that reason 200 years behind. There was a political cost that the Bush administration did not want to pay at that time, investing heavily in counterterrorism in a period of economic recession was a guarantee of being attacked by the opposition and the media, because spending billions to prevent something that did not even happen when the economy is in tatters? The timing of the attacks couldn't be worse.
What many people pretend not to understand is that all the actions taken by the Americans after 9/11 could have been carried out even without the attacks, the United States owned the world and its will was sovereign, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 could have been carried out in 1998 during operation desert fox, the afghan war in 2001 could start at any moment, the excuse of overthrowing an illegitimate extremist islamic government on the other side of the world would be more than enough to win support of a UN, weakened after the cold war. Seeking logical reasons in a post-truth world is childish to say the least. 9/11 is a child of three parents, Al Qaeda that ran the service, the US government that caused all the instability in the region, and ultimately the intelligence community's ego.
The CIA for more than 3 years tried to warn the executive of the risk of a large scale attack carried out by Al Qaeda, but don't believe for a moment that they did it without ulterior motives. The CIA and the FBI are the two largest intelligence agencies in America, and their objectives are similar but the area of operation of each of them is totally different, the FBI carries out internal surveillance, only they are authorized to investigate in American territory, while the CIA does international espionage, and that is the source of the problem, these two agencies are fighting each other for federal resources, promotions and prestige, they only help each other in cases of extreme need, otherwise they work independently, and always as much as possible they actively thwart the rival agency. The pilot training of the jihadists who kidnapped and carried out the 9/11 attacks was carried out within the United States, but the CIA was obviously not authorized to spy on these men, that is the jurisdiction of the FBI, so the reports that were delivered the American president only had information collected abroad, that's why the data was so fragmented, the CIA didn't have all the pieces of this puzzle.
No initiative was taken by the CIA and FBI to join forces in this investigation, both agencies were working on the same case with incomplete information. Much has been debated in the last 20 years about all this, and a conclusion has been reached, if the CIA and the FBI had shared the information that each agency had collected, it is certain that the attacks could have been prevented. Over a million lives have been lost in a duel of egos, that's the truth, and it's far worse than any theory.
What happened after the attacks is surprising, the American people largely did not blame their government for the tragedy, on the contrary, a patriotic wave took the whole country, at that moment the world had been divided between us and them. Americans treated the victims of the world trade center as part of their family, and the Bush administration deftly managed to co-opt this entire revolt to turn the failure of its government and its intelligence into a new enemy, the War on Terror was the American response to the world about their own mistakes. 3,482 people died by drowning in the United States in the year 2000 alone, while 3,457 people were murdered in terrorist attacks in the 20 years following the 9/11 attacks, of those over 3000 people, 2908 died on 9/11.
We give terrorists far more credit than they actually deserve, Al Qaeda in its heyday was nothing more than a poorly unified group whose dreams were far greater than its ability to execute them. In general the Jihadists are small and unstructured groups, formed by ignorant incompetents, they are pitiful when analyzed rationally, they became so large and influential thanks to the interests that governments around the world had in creating a new enemy, to justify their criminal actions. The costs of domestic security in the United States between 2001 and 2015 exceeded 1 trillion dollars, this absurd amount would only be justified if intelligence agencies were able to prevent on average about 333 large-scale attacks per year, a little more than the 15 search warrants issued in that period.
The value of 1 trillion of course does not include the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose values reached 1. 9 trillion and 2. 3 trillion respectively, in total the costs of the war on terror in the last 20 years reached 8 trillion dollars and more than 900,000 lives were wasted, of which about 387,000 were innocent civilians.
The American response to the 9/11 attacks would be equivalent to killing an ant with a nuclear warhead. The more than 100,000 members of the intelligence community were deeply ashamed of this failure, and wanted to prevent at all costs something similar from ever happening again. The justification given by the CIA, FBI and NSA for not cooperating in the investigations of this case, was in the bureaucracy of the North American state, they argued that the laws that govern the sharing of information between agencies are too rigid, and this hinders the investigations.
This is a half-truth, yes there were legal limits that prevented agencies from sharing some types of information with each other without oversight, but if it was in the CIA's interest to hand over all the information they had about al Qaeda to the FBI, or see and vice versa, this was entirely possible, no judge would reject a request for information sharing when dealing with a terrorism investigation. But at that specific moment, where the entire government and population were terrified, the narrative that intelligence agencies had many restrictions on their work, and that if those restrictions were to fall, attacks like 9/11 would never happen again, was widely accepted by the American society. This was the window of opportunity that the bureaucrats of the intelligence community took advantage of, a law written a long time ago was unraveled, which had been put aside because its content in normal times would never be approved, was taken out of the shadows and put on the agenda.
by the US Congress, that law is the Patriot Act. Passed on October 26, 2001, exactly 45 days after the attacks, the Patriotic Act is an extremely comprehensive law that gives the US government almost unlimited powers to investigate and suppress terrorist operations on US soil or abroad. Several articles of this law are “sunset provision'', which means, that these articles have an expiration date and require presidential renewal to remain in effect.
It was divided into 10 sections that cover from the financing of counterterrorism actions carried out by the United States, how the army will act in the context of combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, it also deals with the fund dedicated to families who are victims of terrorism and of how intelligence agencies can act in identifying the sources of income of these terrorist groups, with the expansion of the scope of the law, which deals with domestic and international money laundering. But the most relevant point of the whole Patriot Act is none of those that I mentioned, in the second section of the act, which deals with surveillance procedures, is where the devil hides, more specifically in section 215. But before talking about section 215 I need to tell you a story, the story of the first and only American president to resign.
On June 15, 1917, just over a month after the Americans declared war on the German empire, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act, this law aimed at punishing foreign spies and American citizens who somehow leaked information from the army. and American government to other nations, irrespective of their objectives, whether with the intention of preventing some army operation or promoting the success of foreign nations in wars in which the United States took part. The law also covers those accused of mutiny, those who try to prevent the process of recruitment and insubordination, that is, a soldier who refuses to comply with orders, no matter how bad, will be indicted for the same crime as a Russian spy, for example.
Punishments for individuals accused of espionage range from 30 years imprisonment to the death penalty, this is certainly not a crime anyone would want to be indicted. A first version of the law gave the president of the United States unlimited powers to censor the press, but as this point contradicted the first amendment of the US Constitution, the law was enacted without this article. Fact is, in a context of war, a law like these makes sense, after all the fate of an entire nation can be decided with a leak, but the Espionage Act remained in force even with the end of the conflict in Europe, it was widely applied by the remainder of the 20th century by the American government, to indict Nazi and Communist spies in the conflicts that followed.
This law was written in a purposely vague way, by disregarding the motives of the “spy” , any kind of leaks of secret information can be treated as an act of espionage, making this crime worse than murder. In a trial, an accused of murder can argue that he acted in self-defense, regardless of whether this is true or false, the Jury must consider this possibility in its decision, but in the case of espionage the situation becomes binary, leaked secret information or not, simple as that, and the sentence will be applied according to the negative or positive in that charge. The accused does not have the right to explain his motives, and even if he does, the jury will not be able to take this justification into account, it is because of this that the crime of espionage becomes worse than murder.
The reason the Espionage Act has remained in force since 1917 is that it has served as a glove for all subsequent governments to suppress dissidents within their ranks, the fear of being sentenced to a life in prison or losing it is enough to prevent whistleblowers from spawning. But even with the full certainty that his life will end, there are still those who accept to sacrifice everything for the truth. The first major leak in American history happened during the Vietnam War, the pentagon papers.
In 1967, during the Lyndon Johnson administration, the United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara organizes a study group with the objective of producing an encyclopedia about the Vietnam War, telling the entire history of American action between 1945 and the end of the conflict. , he does not inform the president or the secretary of state about the creation of this study group, much less its purpose, his objective was to leave to historians “an accurate source of those events”. The risks of producing such a document never crossed his mind, but it was done, about 47 volumes totaling more than 3000 pages of historical analysis and more than 4000 original documents classified as secret and top secret.
Daniel Ellsberg was one of the members of this study group, and it was he who in 1971, during the government of Richard Nixon, along with Anthony Russo, leaked all this material to the press. The content of the pentagon papers falls like a bomb on American society, which at that time was already cracked, the population no longer supported the intervention of the army in Southeast Asia and with the dissemination of this content, detailing the bombings in Cambodia and Laos, the coastal attacks to North Vietnam and the questionable role of the Marines in the war, information that was never disclosed by the government to the media. Among all these revelations, the true motivation of the American government in that region is finally stated, its objective was not to help an allied country, which in this case would be South Vietnam, in a war for its independence against the communists of North Vietnam, but rather to prevent the Chinese advance on that territory.
The population's support for the war not only ends, but the government and the army are severely criticized for causing this war for no reason. By the year 1971 about 58,000 young Americans had died in the forests of Vietnam for nothing. At first the Nixon administration decides not to do anything about this leak, after all this scandal is the result of the actions of Kennedy and Johnson, but members of his administration argue that this leak can set a precedent, a dangerous precedent, the media can to feel compelled to search for more and more secret documents to release to the public, this was too great a risk the US government was unwilling to take.
In this way the Nixon administration tries to "convince" the New York Times to close its publications dedicated to the Pentagon Papers, this negotiation fails and its government takes this case to the American Supreme Court invoking the espionage law, after all the New York Times did not have the legal authorization to release material deemed secret, the government wins in the courts, at least temporarily, and the newspaper is forced to stop publishing this material after only 3 articles on June 14, '71. On June 18, the Washington Post begins to publish its own articles about the pentagon papers, that same day the government tried to negotiate with the newspaper to close these publications, a request that was promptly denied by the company. The government then tries to legally suspend this disclosure again, but this time Judge Gerhard Gessel rejects this request.
The government was in the following position, in order to try to suppress this story it would be forced to sue all the country's media outlets, but that was not necessary, after June 14 the New York Times appeals the Supreme Court's decision, which about 15 days later, it votes again on this case and gives the victory to the newspaper, which was constitutionally protected by the first amendment, which guarantees freedom of the press. The US government's fear of setting a precedent had materialized, but the press also came to fear the government, until that moment no president had tried so explicitly to censor the press, and this fear would become one of the media's biggest problems. American in the 21st century.
The government, seeing that it could do nothing against the press, turns its attention to the cause of it all, Daniel Ellsberg is captured in boston and promptly admits to having leaked these secret documents to the media, he felt that the American people should know what his government was doing abroad, he said he could no longer be a part of these lies, but, his motives didn't matter, he and Anthony Russo were accused of the crime of espionage. On January 3, 1973, Ellsberg was sentenced to 115 years in prison, while Russo is sentenced to 35, but to their surprise, the government kept trying to increase the punishment imposed on them, and this ended up backfiring, phone recordings without court authorization were presented as evidence by the FBI on May 9, recordings that mysteriously disappeared a few days later. Prior to this episode John Ehrlichman, aide to President Nixon, offered Judge William Byrne a position as director of the FBI, an offer that was turned down by the judge, who would not accept that position until the Ellsberg case was over.
Seeing the circus that this trial had become, in parallel with the excellent work done by the defense attorneys, Judge Byrne ends up rejecting all the charges made against Ellsberg and Russo, who were acquitted and released. This was a major defeat for the Nixon administration, which at the same time was tackling Watergate, which was America's first surveillance scandal. The leak of the pentagon papers was the kick-off to the end of Richard Nixon's term, a week after the beginning of the coverage carried out by the New York Times in 1971, members of the White House organized a task force, the White House Plumbers, totally illegal, which aimed to gather evidence against Daniel Ellsberg.
This group ended up expanding its operations, effectively becoming Richard Nixon's personal secret police, which solved the president's problems, which ranged from tapping groups protesting the Vietnam War, spying on civil rights activists and even securing his re-election. . They were involved in a dozen different crimes, but the one that made them famous was the invasion of the Democratic party committee at the Watergate hotel in June 1972.
The plan was simple: break into the Democratic committee, photograph documents and tap all phones, but they failed and 5 men were arrested and a long investigation began. The White House wiretaps resulted in the conviction by the American Supreme Court against President Richard Nixon, who was supposed to hand over all recordings made proving his participation in this case, this resulted in the opening of an impeachment process by Congress. On August 9, 1974, Nixon resigns as president, and a month later his successor, Gerald Ford, pardons Nixon, clearing him of all charges.
48 Nixon government officials were sentenced, several of them to more than 40 years in prison, but none of them served even a third of that time. Finally, the first surveillance scandal in US history was a warning to the public that the government cared little about their privacy, and that the only thing limiting them was technology. It's almost comical that Richard Nixon got away with it, while Daniel Ellsberg had been sentenced to 155 years in prison.
“The right of the people to the inviolability of their persons, houses, papers and effects against arbitrary search and seizure shall not be infringed; and no warrant shall be issued except on evidence of guilt confirmed by oath or declaration, and particularly with a description of the place of search and an indication of the persons or things to be seized. ” This is the fourth amendment of the US constitution, and it is precisely the amendment that was discarded in October 2001. Section 215 was a watershed, because until that moment the government theoretically could not carry out wiretaps without prior judicial authorization against anyone, even As the decades passed, more and more rumors about surveillance carried out by the US government exploded in the media, no one could say with certainty that the government could be carrying out mass surveillance against its own citizens.
In 1978 a judicial mechanism was implemented to regulate American internal and external surveillance , which until that time had been in legal limbo. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was created as a response to the illegal actions taken by Richard Nixon during his tenure, prohibiting the government from spying on innocent American citizens. From that moment on, the FISA Secret Tribunal was created to regulate the spying carried out by the executive, but in a way that would guarantee national security.
Any type of investigation that involves electronic surveillance and search and seizure against suspected involvement in criminal actions, should require a warrant directly in the FISA court, previously this type of warrant was issued by conventional courts, and this in the intelligence agencies' view was a great risk to the secrecy of its operations. The creation of this court technically made the investigations carried out by the CIA and FBI legal. The point is, between the year the court was created in 1979 to 2001, exactly 14,019 warrants were requested by US intelligence in a 22-year window, and absolutely none of them were denied.
These numbers change dramatically from 9/11, between 2002 and 2013, 21,314 warrants were requested and a total of 8 were denied. The FISA Tribunal is in fact nothing more than a federal stamp for American intelligence, a mere ornament that gives legal legitimacy to the agencies' investigations, especially after 2001. The Patriot Act further limited the powers of the FISA Tribunal, after all the 9/11 attacks .
they only happened because the role of the intelligence community is limited by law. Section 215 served to eliminate this ornament from the equation, once the law goes into effect the government is given almost unlimited powers to carry out surveillance against American citizens, as section 215 allows the government to collect all kinds of information without the need to provide solid justification for obtaining a warrant, it is enough for the government to say that this target is part of a terrorism investigation that it is authorized to collect all sorts of information, and the companies involved are required by law to hand over that information. The Bush administration made full use of section 215, and its purposeful holes, during its 7-year term in office following the passage of the Patriot Act, and the biggest surveillance scandal since the Watergate affair exploded in its hands in 2005.
Journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau on December 16, 2005 published in the New York Times an article detailing the President's Surveillance Program, or PSP, a project authorized by President Bush a few months after the 9/11 attacks that gave the American intelligence community full autonomy to spy on its citizens without any warrant issued by the Fisa Court. It is estimated that up to 500 US citizens were spied on at all times without any warrant, during the 3 years that the PSP was in force, while abroad, around 5000 to 7000 people were spied on, all of whom were suspected of having ties to organizations terrorists. Officially, the US Constitution had been torn up, but not in the eyes of Bush administration officials, who made use of an at least questionable interpretation of the constitutionality of their actions, an interpretation that a very limited group of people was aware of.
Fact is, they argued that this was necessary, intelligence agencies felt bound by the law, and that was a risk, a quick response to the slightest sign of Al Qaeda movement was essential, often several clusters of numbers began to be monitored. at the same time, it becomes impractical to request a warrant from the Fisa Tribunal. The checks and balances of the law made sense in peacetime, but now, the United States was at war, but of course, government officials ensured that their privacy and civil rights were guaranteed, and that the Patriot Act didn't give a damn .
white the NSA to spy on American citizens, that couldn't be further from the truth argues John Yoo, an officer in the US Department of Justice. It would be beautiful if it were true, the publication of this article was delayed by more than a year at the request of the White House, for reasons of "national security", it was only published in December 2005 because Risen pressured the newspaper, saying that that material had been included in his forthcoming book. This article could have turned the tide of the 2004 election.
… Journalists didn't have much more than reports from NSA and Department of Justice officials to work with, and that made it very easy for the government to object to any accusation aimed at the executive, but even so, all the controversy surrounding the PSP was enough to bury the program, at least that's what the press had said, that the program had expired in 2007, but that was a gigantic lie. To get this target off its back, the White House released a non-confidential report in 2009 on the surveillance program of presidents, to evade a formal US congressional investigation into the real scope of surveillance carried out by the NSA during the Bush administration. This report was a compilation of 5 US government agencies, without an investigative character, therefore, without any cross-examination of those high-ranking government officials who had authorized the PSP in the first place.
It was written loosely, without going into detail leaving an impression of “The public is exaggerating too much”, no legal justification was given in this report, and finally in the fine print several times references to “other intelligence activities” were made. This report was enough to bury the interest of the American people and the press in the surveillance carried out by the NSA, but in the meantime, the Obama administration retroactively renews the validity of various aspects of the PSP, greatly expanding its surveillance power . relatório entregue à imprensa sobre o PSP era uma grande mentira, havia uma versão Ultra Secreta que supostamente apenas uma dezena de pessoas no mundo poderiam ter acesso, e por um golpe do destino um mero administrador de sistemas teve acesso a ele.
O objetivo final da NSA era apenas um, coletar todas as comunicações realizadas na internet, a necessidade legal de mandados era um estorvo, o seu objetivo não poderia ser limitado por lei s ultrapassadas, eles sabiam que aquilo que eles estavam fazendo era criminoso e inconstitucional, mas eles fizeram mesmo assim. A autorização do PSP era presidencial e de aspecto temporário, o objetivo por traz de sua criação era identificar possiveis atentados terroristas contra os estados unidos, em seus estágios inicias de prepração. E para cumprir esse papel, a PSP autorizou a NSA a coletar 4 tipos distintos de dados, o conteúdo telefônico, como gravações, conteúdo de internet, como emails e mensagens e os principais, metadados de telefonia e internet.
Esses metadados não contém o conteúdo do email enviado, ou a gravação da conversa realizada, mas eles se tornaram a principal ferramenta na vigilância em massa realizada pela NSA. Tudo que se faz deixa rastros, os metadados são esses rastros, no envio de um email é registrado a hora, o lugar, para quem esse email foi enviado, o tipo de computador que você possui, o momento em que o email é lido, quando e por qual máquina ele é respondido, todo o tráfego de internet necessário para que essa mensagem chegue ao destinatário é registrada, o conteúdo se torna irrelevante quando se possui todas as outras informações ao redor do alvo. Em 2009, ano em que o relatório ultra secreto a respeito do PSP é redigido, os metadados que a NSA conseguiu adquirir e compilar durante o período Bush, ainda eram rudimentares comparados aos dados obtidos no governo Obama.
Era possível construir padrões através dos metadados de telefonia e internet que realizavam a identificação de membros de uma organização alvo, seja terrorista ou não. As regras para essa coleta foram bem claras, a NSA estava autorizada a coletar informações de qualquer um, contanto que pelo menos um dos participantes não seja um cidadão americano, para não infringir a 4 emenda. Com essa prerrogativa a NSA poderia finalmente conduzir espionagem em território nacional, sem a necessidade de um mandado.
Com um escopo tão amplo era inevitável que centenas de milhares, ou milhões de cidadãos americanos estivessem sendo espionados a todo momento, sem nenhum tipo de mandado judicial, e era justamente isso que estava acontecendo. Essa é a origem do Stellarwind, o segredo mais obscuro da NSA durante a era Bush. Ele estava sob o guarda chuva do PSP e era a vigilância em massa que o governo americano estava fazendo.
A NSA diferenciava os dados que ela coletava entre, dados coletados e armazenados e aqueles dados coletados e lidos, na interpretação da agência enquanto esses dados não fossem lidos nenhum crime foi cometido, portanto a quarta emenda da constituição não seria violada. Ou seja, metadados de cidadãos americanos estavam sendo coletados em todo o país, e armazenados em algum das dezenas de complexos de servidores sob controle da NSA construídos desde 2001, a partir daquele momento o governo americano estava a alguns cliques de descobrir toda sua vida, onde você mora, com quem você mora, quanto você ganha, com quem você interage, tudo, absolutamente tudo. Já em outubro de 2001, nos primeiros dias do PSP e StellarWind, os principais parceiros da NSA começaram a compartilhar seus dados telefônicos e de internet para a agência, por parceiros eu digo, as 100 das maiores empresas de tecnologia da época, tanto as domésticas quanto estrangeiras, cerca de 81% de todas as ligações internacionais realizadas a partir estados unidos ou para os estados unidos foram monitoradas entre os anos de 2001 e 2007.
A operação da NSA que possuia caráter temporário, se tornou rapidamente definitiva, com suas autorizações sendo permanentemente renovadas pelos oficiais de estado responsáveis por fiscalizar as ações da comunidade de inteligência e garantir que as liberdades civis não estavam sendo violadas. A eterna vigilância havia se tornado realidade.
