Najibullah Zazi hates PRISM

[arely staircase]

Last edited Sun Jun 9, 2013, 11:08 AM - Edit history (1)

PRISM Stopped Najibullah Zazi From Blowing Up Backpacks in the Subway

"If you look at the Najibullah Zazi case, you have a classic example there. So on September 6, 2009, around dawn, an e-mail comes from an IP address to another IP address. One of them is nothing we're paying attention to. The other is one that has been flagged as an al Qaeda mail drop that is rarely used."

"And so when that bell rings, they say, 'Hey, they hardly ever use this account, but it's associated with Rashid Rauf, who is al Qaeda's master bomb maker, behind the plot to blow up all the airplanes, 'Who's he talking to?' And when they find out the other IP address on the other end resolves to Aurora, Colo., outside Denver, it connects them to Zazi, it takes them to the plot to blow up the New York subways, it's all prevented. That's how a program like this is supposed to work."

On Sept. 8, 2009, Zazi rented a car and drove from Denver to New York, taking with him the explosives and other materials necessary to build the bombs. Zazi arrived in New York City on Thursday, Sept.10, 2009. Zazi and others intended to obtain and assemble the remaining components of the bombs over the weekend and conduct the attack on Manhattan subway lines on Sept. 14, Sept. 15, or Sept. 16, 2009. However, shortly after arriving in New York, Zazi realized that law enforcement was investigating his activities.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/prism-najibullah-zazi-subway-nsa.html

Unlike the massive phone recors collection, I'm not sure I have much of a problem with this. The program was monitoring a foreign IP address associated with an AQ bombmaker and soemone in the US draws attention to himself by sending a message to it. That someone was going to set off bombs on the NY subway, but is now facing life in prison (as oppose to being declare an enemy combatant like he would have been under Bush.)

[arely staircase]

1. oops, now with link

nt

[backscatter712]

2. This authoritarian apologist bullshit again? *PLONK*

This has already been debunked. It wasn't NSA snooping that caught these guys, it was old-fashioned police work.

This debate is tiresome, and I'm sick of dealing with authoritarian assholes on this site.

[arely staircase]

4. link please

to the alleged debunking.

[Melinda]

9. Public documents contradict Prism claim

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/public-documents-contradict-claim-email-spying-foiled-terror

Defenders of the American government’s online spying program known as “PRISM” claimed Friday that the suddenly controversial secret effort had saved New York City’s subways from a 2009 terrorist plot led by a young Afghan-American, Najibullah Zazi.

But British and American legal documents from 2010 and 2011 contradict that claim, which appears to be the latest in a long line of attempts to defend secret programs by making, at best, misleading claims that they were central to stopping terror plots. While the court documents don’t exclude the possibility that PRISM was somehow employed in the Zazi case, the documents show that old-fashioned police work, not data mining, was the tool that led counterterrorism agents to arrest Zazi. The public documents confirm doubts raised by the blogger Marcy Wheeler and the AP’s Adam Goldman, and call into question a defense of PRISM first floated by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, who suggested that PRISM had stopped a key terror plot.

-snip-

The path to his capture, according to the public records, began in April 2009, when British authorities arrested several suspected terrorists. According to a 2010 ruling from Britain’s Special Immigration Appeals Commission, one of the suspects’ computers included email correspondence with an address in Pakistan.

The open case is founded upon a series of emails exchanged between a Pakistani registered email account [e-mail] and an email account admittedly used by Naseer [e-mail] between 30 November 2008 and 3 April 2009. The Security Service’s assessment is that the user of the sana_pakhtana account was an Al Qaeda associate…”

More at link. Read the testimony of the FBI agent.

Debunked.

[arely staircase]

13. no not really

the author admits it doesn't prove PRISM wasn't used.

[MNBrewer]

16. It doesn't prove that MAGIC wasn't used either.

Geez.

[arely staircase]

17. but unlike magic

the uthor admits PRISM could have been used.

[MNBrewer]

18. MAGIC could have been used too.

[arely staircase]

20. author doesn't mention it could have been

he does mention that PRISM could have been. and since the government uses PRISM to track terrorists and not magice (that I know of) it is a fallacious comparison.

[MNBrewer]

21. WHat difference does that make?

Did the author state that he was giving an exhaustive list of things that MIGHT have led to the outcome?

[arely staircase]

22. court documents "contradict" is a far cry from "disprove"

therefore no debunking

[MNBrewer]

24. Improbability, then.

[arely staircase]

27. why would the govenrment mention their secret program in court docs?

nt

[Melinda]

29. Your OP doesn't prove Prism responsible either. All that is proven is Prism existed at the time.

Your article makes assertions w/out evidence. Buzzfeed's article actual court documents and testimony from an FBI agent all of which assert Prism had very little if anything to do with Najibullah Zazi's capture.

Do you really not see there is more to this than meets the eye?

Look, I presume every member of DU voted for and has supported President Obama over these many years - I know I voted for him twice. But blind loyalty leads to blindness. Our government has a long history of intelligence atrocities committed against our own citizenry. Do the revelations of the last few weeks concern you at all? Why do you seemingly dismiss these events so easily?

[OilemFirchen]

6. Your plonk now lives in G-Man Harry Harrison's Blackberry.

Check your car for tracking devices before you leave for the store.

[JaneyVee]

7. Could it be that it was blamed on police work in order to keep spying program under wraps?

After all, it was classified. Can't exactly throw a party for a classified program.

[Puzzledtraveller]

10. I second the emotion basckscatter

[naaman fletcher]

11. results of jury service

Mail Message
At Sun Jun 9, 2013, 11:25 AM an alert was sent on the following post:

This authoritarian apologist bullshit again? *PLONK*
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2976442

REASON FOR ALERT:

This post is disruptive, hurtful, rude, insensitive, over-the-top, or otherwise inappropriate. (See <a href="http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=aboutus#communitystandards" target="_blank">Community Standards</a>.)

ALERTER'S COMMENTS:

Disagreeing with someone is no reason to call them an "authoritarian asshole."

You served on a randomly-selected Jury of DU members which reviewed this post. The review was completed at Sun Jun 9, 2013, 11:33 AM, and the Jury voted 3-3 to LEAVE IT.

Juror #1 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: sounds like arely staircase has a case of butthurt in the first degree
Juror #2 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: No explanation given
Juror #3 voted to HIDE IT and said: No explanation given
Juror #4 voted to HIDE IT and said: No explanation given
Juror #5 voted to HIDE IT and said: No explanation given
Juror #6 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: If the jackboots fit.......

Thank you very much for participating in our Jury system, and we hope you will be able to participate again in the future.

[arely staircase]

14. for the record

i didn't send the alert

[Marr]

23. +1- same here.

[treestar]

3. You can bet that had it happened

The board would be full of posts on how the government "dropped the ball" and failed to "connect the dots" with hardly any blame going to Zazi.

Kind of looking forward to Dzhokhar's trial and seeing the same posters ranting on about how the government could have caught he and Tamerlan. I expect to see posts along the lines of "Obama is as much to blame for this as Tamerlan" and "Obama failed us." Obama killed that 8 year old, blah blah, I am willing to bet on this.

[arely staircase]

5. sad, but true

nt

[Spider Jerusalem]

8. Or it didn't

The break in that case came, according to court documents and testimony, when Zazi emailed a Yahoo address seeking help with his bomb recipe.

At that time, British intelligence officials knew the Yahoo address was associated with an al-Qaida leader in Pakistan. That's because, according to British government documents released in 2010, officials had discovered it on the computer of a terror suspect there months earlier.

The path to his capture, according to the public records, began in April 2009, when British authorities arrested several suspected terrorists. According to a 2010 ruling from Britain’s Special Immigration Appeals Commission, one of the suspects’ computers included email correspondence with an address in Pakistan.

The open case is founded upon a series of emails exchanged between a Pakistani registered email account [e-mail] and an email account admittedly used by Naseer [e-mail] between 30 November 2008 and 3 April 2009. The Security Service’s assessment is that the user of the sana_pakhtana account was an Al Qaeda associate…”

“For reasons which are wholly set out in the closed judgment, we are sure satisfied to the criminal standard that the user of the sana_pakhtana account was an Al Qaeda associate,” the British court wrote.

Later that year, according to a transcript of Zazi’s July, 2011 trial, Zazi emailed his al Qaeda handler in Pakistan for help with the recipe for his bombs. He sent his inquiry to the same email address: [e-mail].

An FBI agent, Eric Jurgenson, testified, “I was notified, I should say. My office was in receipt of several e-mail messages, e-mail communications.” Those emails — from Zazi to the same [e-mail] — “led to the investigation,” he testified.

The details of terror investigations are not always laid out this clearly in public; but they appear to belie the notion, advanced by anonymous government officials Friday, that sweeping access to millions of email accounts played an important roil in foiling the subway attack. Instead, this is the sort of investigation made possible by ordinary warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; authorities appear simply to have been monitoring the Pakistani email account that had been linked to terrorists earlier that year.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/public-documents-contradict-claim-email-spying-foiled-terror

[Puzzledtraveller]

12. Well, you share company with the likes of Peter King

He was just on Fox saying that Zazi was stopped by prism. Of course the Fox guy didn't even challenge the assertion and seemed to be in agreement.

[arely staircase]

15. ad hominen fallicy

simply because peter king, stephen king, or don king assert something doesn't make it flse or true.

[MNBrewer]

19. Generally one would look for evidence

Lack of evidence that PRISM wasn't used hardly constitutes a logical triumph.

[Spider Jerusalem]

28. Except that the available evidence says it's false.

the email address of the Al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan Zazi was correspinding with was found on the computer of persons detained by British security services. So it was old-fashioned police work, and intelligence-sharing from the UK, that led to Zazi's arrest and conviction, and not NSA data-gathering.

[SomethingFishy]

25. You think "PRISM" is going to stop terrorists?

Then you have no idea how "terrorism" works. Kill one, stop one, 10 more take their place.

Why is it people in this country think that violence and control are the goddamn solution to every problem?

You want to end terrorism? Stop killing brown people and start feeding them.

[Marr]

26. It's like I'm looking through a wormhole at a 2003 Bushbot.

So many bullshit excuses. This one is unusually Bush-esque in it's fearmongering.