CISAC fellow Rachel Gillum writes in this commentary that the NYPD's decision to disband its special Muslim surveillance unit may eventually aid in counterterrorism efforts as the Muslim community regains trust and works together with the police to identify possible threats.

Gillum, a doctoral candidate in political science at Stanford, is the principal investigator at the Muslim American National Opinion Survey, which aims to better understand the political attitudes and behaviors of the diverse community of Muslims living in the United States.

She writes: "While terrorism in the U.S. remains a serious threat, the measurable results of the NYPD spying program appear to be less than desirable. In addition to potentially suppressing voluntary assistance from the Muslim-American community, after years of collecting information, the NYPD acknowledged that the unit never generated a lead."

The National Security Agency's mass surveillance of telephone metadata could yield detailed information about the private lives of individuals far beyond what the federal government claims, according to new Stanford research.

Stanford computer science student and CISAC cybersecurity fellow Jonathan Mayer and a fellow CS student, Patrick Mutchler, were able to acquire detailed information about people's lives just from telephone metadata: the phone number of the caller and recipient, the particular serial number of the phones involved, the time and duration of calls and possibly the location of each person when the call occurred.

The researchers did not do any illegal snooping – they worked with the phone records of 546 volunteers, matching phone numbers against the public Yelp and Google Places directories to see who was being called.

From the phone numbers, it was possible to determine that 57 percent of the volunteers made at least one medical call. Forty percent made a call related to financial services.

The volunteers called 33,688 unique numbers; 6,107 of those numbers, or 18 percent, were isolated to a particular identity.

Privacy issues

The metadata issue has taken on urgency in the wake of last summer's revelations about surveillance of American citizens by the NSA. Privacy experts have questioned the federal government's assertions on the subject.

President Obama has said, "They are not looking at people's names, and they're not looking at content."

Jonathan Mayer talks to Hari Sreenivasan on PBS Newshour in this video: 

Computer scientists such as Mayer say metadata are extremely sensitive and revealing.

They contend their research shows that metadata from phone calls can yield a wealth of detail about family, political, professional, religious and sexual associations.

"It would be no technical challenge to scale these identifications to a larger population," said Mayer.

At the outset, Mayer said, they asked, "Is it easy to draw sensitive inferences from phone metadata? How often do people conduct sensitive matters by phone? We turned to our crowdsourced MetaPhone dataset for empirical answers."

They crowdsourced the data using an Android application and conducted an analysis of individual calls made by the volunteers to sensitive numbers, connecting the patterns of calls to emphasize the detail available in telephone metadata, Mayer said.

"A pattern of calls will, of course, reveal more than individual call records," he said. "In our analysis, we identified a number of patterns that were highly indicative of sensitive activities or traits."

For example, one participant called several local neurology groups, a specialty pharmacy, a rare-condition management service, and a pharmaceutical hotline used for multiple sclerosis.

Another contacted a home improvement store, locksmiths, a hydroponics dealer and a head shop.

'Unambiguously sensitive'

The researchers initially shared the same hypothesis as their computer science colleagues, Mayer said. They did not anticipate finding much evidence one way or the other.

"We were wrong. Phone metadata is unambiguously sensitive, even over a small sample and short time window. We were able to infer medical conditions, firearm ownership and more, using solely phone metadata," he said.

All three branches of the federal government are now considering curbs on access to telephone metadata, Mayer noted. Consumer privacy concerns are also salient as the Federal Communications Commission assesses telecom data sharing practices, he added.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is alleging the CIA may have violated the U.S. Constitution by spying on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Feinstein, D-Calif., who chairs the committee and has been a longtime supporter of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, made a dramatic speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, accusing the CIA of possible criminal activity in its attempts to obstruct the committee’s investigation into the agency’s use of torture in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

CIA Director John Brennan has dismissed the charges as “beyond the scope of reason” and insists the CIA has broken no laws.

CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart, an intelligence expert, tells Politico: “This is the most serious feud since the Intelligence committees were established."

Zegart, a former National Security Council staffer, answers questions about the dispute: 

Brennan said Feinstein's accusations of the CIA possibly violating the U.S. Constitution are "beyond the scope of reason." What's going on between these two?

This is a longstanding and before-now private, bitter fight over how the Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating the CIA's past detention and interrogation programs. The current controversy is about whether congressional staff illegally acquired CIA documents during the course of their investigation and whether the CIA illegally spied on those congressional staffers.

But the deeper fight is really about how history will record and judge the Bush administration's detention and interrogation policies. It's a complex battle that is tinged with politics. The Senate investigation began years ago as a bipartisan effort to examine these policies and their efficacy. Eventually, though, Republican members of the committee felt they could no longer participate. So we're now in a bizarre world where Democratic senators on the Intelligence Committee are feuding with a Democratic administration about investigating controversial policies practices that occurred under a Republican predecessor.

Feinstein calls the crisis a defining moment for the agency. Is it?

This is an extraordinary moment for CIA-congressional relations and the worst feud since the Church Committee investigation of CIA abuses in the 1970s. Oversight is always a delicate dance between intelligence officials who believe strongly in the importance of secrecy for carrying out their mission and lawmakers who believe strongly in the value of transparency to maintain the public trust. Intelligence officials never freely volunteer details of their agencies' activities. It's Congress's job to probe, to ask tough questions and demand good answers. 

But this is different than the usual tension between intelligence overseers and agencies. Feinstein isn't accusing the CIA of stonewalling or not telling the full truth. She is accusing the agency of spying on and intimidating her staff. That's totally out of bounds. For Feinstein, this conflict is Constitutional – raising serious questions about separation of powers and Congress's ability to check the executive's most powerful agencies. It is institutional, calling into question the role of her committee in particular. And it is personal. She is claiming that her own staff has been referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution.

How serious is this for CIA Director Brennan, who vehemently denies the accusations and says no computers were hacked. 

The CIA is in big-time trouble. We may never know what actually happened in a basement room in Virginia where congressional staffers were reading millions of pages of CIA documents on computers. What matters more now is the political narrative. Ever since Edward Snowden – the former contractor for the National Security Agency – started releasing documents last June, the political narrative has been that U.S. intelligence agencies spy on and lie to just about everyone.

Much of this narrative is woefully distorted and just plain wrong. NSA is not out there listening to your calls with grandma. And there is still no evidence that NSA programs violated the law. But the narrative of distrust is powerful. Which is why Sen. Feinstein's charges against the CIA -- coming from one of the intelligence community's biggest defenders -- is so devastating.

In the post-9/11 world, forging a successful grand strategy in U.S. foreign policy is unlikely and dangerous, according to a Stanford scholar.

During the Cold War, American leaders understood that the Soviet Union was their primary adversary, writes political scientist Amy Zegart in an essay for the Hoover Institution's Foreign Policy Working Group, a new two-year initiative that brings together Stanford scholars to examine key U.S. foreign policy challenges.

Zegart, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, notes that the Soviet threat – one of nuclear annihilation – brought a singular focus to U.S. foreign policy for the second half of the 20th century.

Successful grand strategies, she writes, depend on knowing the number and identities of one's enemies, what they want, how they operate and what damage they can unleash.

That is no longer the case in 2014 and for the foreseeable future, she suggests.

"The post-9/11 threat environment is vastly different," notes Zegart. Today, the number, identity and magnitude of dangers threatening American interests are all "wildly uncertain."

Exactly how many principal adversaries does the United States face at any given time? Who are they and what do they want? What could they do to America? Is China a rising threat or a responsible stakeholder? How likely is a "digital Pearl Harbor" that cripples U.S. strategic forces or financial institutions?

The answer to all these questions, she writes, is that nobody really knows: "Each day, it seems, we are told to be very afraid about something different and vaguely sinister."

On top of this, grand strategy requires dynamic international collaboration. But organizations like NATO, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations Security Council are "out of whack with current power realities," writes Zegart. Gaps exist between the "aspirations and capabilities" of international organizations that typically forge partnerships with America.

A new approach

If grand strategy is outdated – and even dangerous – what can be done?

The first step is to give up on notions of grand strategy, Zegart advises. Instead, the United States should strive for what FSI Senior Fellow and working group co-chair Stephen Krasner calls "orienting principles." These are policy ideas that lie between ad hoc reactions to arising situations and grand visions of how the future should unfold.

"Orienting principles aren't glamorous," Zegart writes, "but they hold out the prospect of something better than foreign policy a la carte or a grand strategy that mis-estimates the threat environment and misunderstands the organizational requirements for success."

When grand strategies work well, they are truly grand, says Zegart. "That is, they must be able to anticipate and articulate a compelling future state of the world and galvanize the development of policies, institutions and capabilities at the domestic and international level to get us there. That's hard enough."

A second challenge, she adds, is the strategic interaction part of grand strategy, which requires thwarting and adjusting to the countermoves of principal adversaries.

"Grand strategy is not a game of solitaire, where we come up with all the moves and the cards just sit there. It's not all about us and our big ideas," she notes.

Instead, grand strategy is a multi-player game with powerful adversaries seeking to impose their national wills on the world to serve their own interests, Zegart observes.

"The sorry truth is that American grand strategies are usually alluring but elusive," she concludes. "The Cold War this isn't. We live in a hazy threat du jour world. This is too much complexity and uncertainty for grand strategy to handle."