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Curated research library of TV news clips regarding the NSA, its oversight and privacy issues, 2009-2014

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Primary curation & research: Robin Chin, Internet Archive TV News Researcher; using Internet Archive TV News service.

Speakers

David Sanger
New York Times, Chief Washington Correspondent
KQED 01/15/2014
Sanger: Most of its cyberactivity is through those big optical telephone cables that run across the Atlantic and Pacific or through regional networks. But what do you do with a compute their separated from all networks, that an intelligence agency or some other agency of government or a company might separate out to keep all the data secret? And that's a problem that the NSA has had for years. And they had it in particular with the Iranian computers that were running the nuclear enrichment program.
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David Sanger
New York Times, Chief Washington Correspondent
KQED 01/15/2014
Sanger: and so this technology puts a small radio transmitter into say a thumb drive or sometimes even into a circuit board in the compute that can broadcast back to a facility called a night stand. It's basically the size of a briefcase that would pick up the data and also allow the NSA to insert malware as they did in the Iranian case. Ifill: Physically insert, presumably in the production process or at some point like that.
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David Sanger
New York Times, Chief Washington Correspondent
KQED 01/15/2014
Sanger: In the production process or maybe in the shipping process or you know, a scientist is at a trade show or a scientific conference and gets a thumb drive or there is a maintenance person who comes in. And in the course of my reporting on Olympic games, the program against Iran, it was clear that some device like this had been used back and forth. We withheld a few of the details at that time at the government's request but then the papers came out and Der Spiegel published some of the details of this several weeks ago. Ifill: In fact Der Spiegel published an actual catalog of these kinds of devices.
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David Sanger
New York Times, Chief Washington Correspondent
CNNW 01/19/2015
Sanger: The interesting thing is the North Koreans themselves protested "The Interview" as far back as last June and said if Sony released it it could be an act of war. It's not clear that anybody in the intelligence community connected that with those phishing attacks and denial of service attacks Brian just referred to. In fact in our reporting it showed that when they saw the North Koreans do these they thought it was the ordinary things North Koreans do to many. Although the fact there was so much at Sony you would have thought might have raised some alarm bells. Apparently it didn't. Sony executives tell me they never received any particular warning. Blitzer: So from President Obama on down the FBI director, the NSC Director, everybody else they are convinced 100% this was the work of North Korea although some outside cyberwarfare experts have their doubts right? Sanger: That’s right.
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David Sanger
New York Times, Chief Washington Correspondent
CNNW 01/19/2015
Sanger: There are a lot of people with a lot of doubts and that’s because the data that has been made public so far by the United States has to do with things like what i.p. addresses these came from internet protocol addresses, many of which are in China. Many of those experts say you can fake where you're sending a cyberattack from. The difference here is as soon as we saw President Obama make the statements that he made at that news conference on December 19th to accuse North Korea of it and their leadership of it you knew given his own caution on intel issues that he must have seen or heard something. We went out to try to figure out what that was, and what it was of course was just what we reported now.
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David Sanger
New York Times, Chief Washington Correspondent
CNNW 01/19/2015
Sanger: The administration is always concerned when you're reporting on national security issues. This story was no different. We try to be very careful when we do these, not only to show our conclusions back to the administration but to hear their concerns and most of the time those concerns are how specific are you about where this computer malware is put because obviously they don't want their adversaries to go after it. In this case I would say the objections were about as they usually are. We try to accommodate them on some issues while still telling this overall story. I think in this case we have struck the balance right. But there are always going to be people who are going to disagree on that. Blitzer: Certain details you withheld? Sanger: Some details we withheld. You will also recall that some details are in the Snowden documents and Der Spiegel, the German magazine published some just this weekend that dealt with North Korea with some specificity as well.
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