Richard Ledgett: The NSA responds to Edward Snowden's TED Talk

Chris Anderson: We had Edward Snowden here

a couple days ago,

and this is response time.

And several of you have written to me

with questions to ask our guest here from the NSA.

So Richard Ledgett is the 15th deputy director

of the National Security Agency,

and he's a senior civilian officer there,

acts as its chief operating officer,

guiding strategies, setting internal policies,

and serving as the principal advisor to the director.

And all being well,

welcome, Rick Ledgett, to TED.

(Applause)

Richard Ledgett: I'm really thankful for the opportunity to talk to folks here.

I look forward to the conversation,

so thanks for arranging for that.

CA: Thank you, Rick.

We appreciate you joining us.

It's certainly quite a strong statement

that the NSA is willing to reach out

and show a more open face here.

You saw, I think,

the talk and interview that Edward Snowden

gave here a couple days ago.

What did you make of it?

RL: So I think it was interesting.

We didn't realize that he was going to show up there,

so kudos to you guys for arranging

a nice surprise like that.

I think that, like a lot of the things

that have come out since Mr. Snowden

started disclosing classified information,

there were some kernels of truth in there,

but a lot of extrapolations and half-truths in there,

and I'm interested in helping to address those.

I think this is a really important conversation

that we're having in the United States

and internationally,

and I think it is important and of import,

and so given that, we need to have that be

a fact-based conversation,

and we want to help make that happen.

CA: So the question that a lot of people have here is,

what do you make of Snowden's motivations

for doing what he did,

and did he have an alternative way that he could have gone?

RL: He absolutely did

have alternative ways that he could have gone,

and I actually think that characterizing him

as a whistleblower

actually hurts legitimate whistleblowing activities.

So what if somebody who works in the NSA --

and there are over 35,000 people who do.

They're all great citizens.

They're just like your husbands, fathers, sisters,

brothers, neighbors, nephews, friends and relatives,

all of whom are interested in doing the right thing

for their country

and for our allies internationally,

and so there are a variety of venues to address

if folks have a concern.

First off, there's their supervisor,

and up through the supervisory chain

within their organization.

If folks aren't comfortable with that,

there are a number of inspectors general.

In the case of Mr. Snowden, he had the option

of the NSA inspector general,

the Navy inspector general,

the Pacific Command inspector general,

the Department of Defense inspector general,

and the intelligence community inspector general,

any of whom would have both kept his concerns in classified channels

and been happy to address them.

(CA and RL speaking at once)

He had the option to go to congressional committees,

and there are mechanisms to do that that are in place,

and so he didn't do any of those things.

CA: Now, you had said that

Ed Snowden had other avenues

for raising his concerns.

The comeback on that is a couple of things:

one, that he certainly believes that as a contractor,

the avenues that would have been available to him as an employee weren't available,

two, there's a track record of other whistleblowers,

like [Thomas Andrews Drake] being treated

pretty harshly, by some views,

and thirdly, what he was taking on

was not one specific flaw that he'd discovered,

but programs that had been approved

by all three branches of government.

I mean, in that circumstance,

couldn't you argue that what he did

was reasonable?

RL: No, I don't agree with that.

I think that the —

sorry, I'm getting feedback

through the microphone there —

the actions that he took were inappropriate

because of the fact that he put people's lives at risk,

basically, in the long run,

and I know there's been a lot of talk

in public by Mr. Snowden and some of the journalists

that say that the things that have been disclosed

have not put national security and people at risk,

and that is categorically not true.

They actually do.

I think there's also an amazing arrogance

to the idea that he knows better than

the framers of the Constitution

in how the government should be designed and work

for separation of powers

and the fact that the executive and the legislative branch

have to work together and they have checks and balances on each other,

and then the judicial branch,

which oversees the entire process.

I think that's extremely arrogant on his part.

CA: Can you give a specific example

of how he put people's lives at risk?

RL: Yeah, sure.

So the things that he's disclosed,

the capabilities,

and the NSA is a capabilities-based organization,

so when we have foreign intelligence targets,

legitimate things of interest --

like, terrorists is the iconic example,

but it includes things like human traffickers,

drug traffickers,

people who are trying to build advanced weaponry, nuclear weapons,

and build delivery systems for those,

and nation-states who might be executing aggression against their immediate neighbors,

which you may have some visibility

into some of that that's going on right now,

the capabilities are applied

in very discrete and measured and controlled ways.

So the unconstrained disclosure of those capabilities

means that as adversaries see them

and recognize, "Hey, I might be vulnerable to this,"

they move away from that,

and we have seen targets in terrorism,

in the nation-state area,

in smugglers of various types, and other folks

who have, because of the disclosures,

moved away from our ability

to have insight into what they're doing.

The net effect of that is that our people

who are overseas in dangerous places,

whether they're diplomats or military,

and our allies who are in similar situations,

are at greater risk because we don't see

the threats that are coming their way.

CA: So that's a general response saying that

because of his revelations,

access that you had to certain types of information

has been shut down, has been closed down.

But the concern is that the nature of that access

was not necessarily legitimate in the first place.

I mean, describe to us this Bullrun program

where it's alleged that the NSA

specifically weakened security

in order to get the type of access that you've spoken of.

RL: So there are, when our

legitimate foreign intelligence targets of the type that I described before,

use the global telecommunications system

as their communications methodology,

and they do, because it's a great system,

it's the most complex system ever devised by man,

and it is a wonder,

and lots of folks in the room there

are responsible for the creation

and enhancement of that,

and it's just a wonderful thing.

But it's also used by people who are

working against us and our allies.

And so if I'm going to pursue them,

I need to have the capability

to go after them,

and again, the controls are in

how I apply that capability,

not that I have the capability itself.

Otherwise, if we could make it so that

all the bad guys used one corner of the Internet,

we could have a domain, badguy.com.

That would be awesome,

and we could just concentrate all our efforts there.

That's not how it works.

They're trying to hide

from the government's ability

to isolate and interdict their actions,

and so we have to swim in that same space.

But I will tell you this.

So NSA has two missions.

One is the Signals Intelligence mission

that we've unfortunately read so much about in the press.

The other one is the Information Assurance mission,

which is to protect the national security systems of the United States,

and by that, that's things like

the communications that the president uses,

the communications that control our nuclear weapons,

the communications that our military uses around the world,

and the communications that we use with our allies,

and that some of our allies themselves use.

And so we make recommendations on standards to use,

and we use those same standards,

and so we are invested

in making sure that those communications

are secure for their intended purposes.

CA: But it sounds like what you're saying is that

when it comes to the Internet at large,

any strategy is fair game

if it improves America's safety.

And I think this is partly where there is such

a divide of opinion,

that there's a lot of people in this room

and around the world

who think very differently about the Internet.

They think of it as a momentous

invention of humanity,

kind of on a par with the Gutenberg press, for example.

It's the bringer of knowledge to all.

It's the connector of all.

And it's viewed in those sort of idealistic terms.

And from that lens,

what the NSA has done is equivalent to

the authorities back in Germany

inserting some device into every printing press

that would reveal which books people bought

and what they read.

Can you understand that from that viewpoint,

it feels outrageous?

RL: I do understand that, and I actually share the view of the utility of the Internet,

and I would argue it's bigger than the Internet.

It is a global telecommunications system.

The Internet is a big chunk of that, but there is a lot more.

And I think that people have legitimate concerns

about the balance between transparency and secrecy.

That's sort of been couched as a balance

between privacy and national security.

I don't think that's the right framing.

I think it really is transparency and secrecy.

And so that's the national and international conversation that we're having,

and we want to participate in that, and want

people to participate in it in an informed way.

So there are things,

let me talk there a little bit more,

there are things that we need to be transparent about:

our authorities, our processes,

our oversight, who we are.

We, NSA, have not done a good job of that,

and I think that's part of the reason

that this has been so revelational

and so sensational in the media.

Nobody knew who we were. We were the No Such Agency, the Never Say Anything.

There's takeoffs of our logo

of an eagle with headphones on around it.

And so that's the public characterization.

And so we need to be more transparent about those things.

What we don't need to be transparent about,

because it's bad for the U.S.,

it's bad for all those other countries that we work with

and that we help provide information

that helps them secure themselves

and their people,

it's bad to expose operations and capabilities

in a way that allows the people that we're all working against,

the generally recognized bad guys,

to counter those.

CA: But isn't it also bad to deal

a kind of body blow to the American companies

that have essentially given the world

most of the Internet services that matter?

RL: It is. It's really the companies are

in a tough position, as are we,

because the companies,

we compel them to provide information,

just like every other nation in the world does.

Every industrialized nation in the world

has a lawful intercept program

where they are requiring companies

to provide them with information

that they need for their security,

and the companies that are involved

have complied with those programs

in the same way that they have to do

when they're operating in Russia or the U.K.

or China or India or France,

any country that you choose to name.

And so the fact that these revelations

have been broadly characterized as

"you can't trust company A because

your privacy is suspect with them"

is actually only accurate in the sense that

it's accurate with every other company in the world

that deals with any of those countries in the world.

And so it's being picked up by people

as a marketing advantage,

and it's being marketed that way by several countries,

including some of our allied countries,

where they are saying,

"Hey, you can't trust the U.S.,

but you can trust our telecom company,

because we're safe."

And they're actually using that to counter

the very large technological edge

that U.S. companies have

in areas like the cloud and Internet-based technologies.

CA: You're sitting there with the American flag,

and the American Constitution guarantees

freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.

How do you characterize

the American citizen's right to privacy?

Is there such a right?

RL: Yeah, of course there is.

And we devote an inordinate amount of time and pressure,

inordinate and appropriate, actually I should say,

amount of time and effort in order to ensure

that we protect that privacy.

and beyond that, the privacy of citizens

around the world, it's not just Americans.

Several things come into play here.

First, we're all in the same network.

My communications,

I'm a user of a particular Internet email service

that is the number one email service of choice

by terrorists around the world, number one.

So I'm there right beside them in email space

in the Internet.

And so we need to be able to pick that apart

and find the information that's relevant.

In doing so, we're going to necessarily encounter

Americans and innocent foreign citizens

who are just going about their business,

and so we have procedures in place that shreds that out,

that says, when you find that,

not if you find it, when you find it, because you're certain to find it,

here's how you protect that.

These are called minimization procedures.

They're approved by the attorney general

and constitutionally based.

And so we protect those.

And then, for people, citizens of the world

who are going about their lawful business

on a day-to-day basis,

the president on his January 17 speech,

laid out some additional protections

that we are providing to them.

So I think absolutely,

folks do have a right to privacy,

and that we work very hard to make sure

that that right to privacy is protected.

CA: What about foreigners using

American companies' Internet services?

Do they have any privacy rights?

RL: They do. They do, in the sense of,

the only way that we are able to compel

one of those companies to provide us information

is when it falls into one of three categories:

We can identify that this particular person,

identified by a selector of some kind,

is associated with counterterrorist

or proliferation or other foreign intelligence target.

CA: Much has been made of the fact that

a lot of the information that you've obtained

through these programs is essentially metadata.

It's not necessarily the actual words

that someone has written in an email

or given on a phone call.

It's who they wrote to and when, and so forth.

But it's been argued,

and someone here in the audience has talked

to a former NSA analyst who said

metadata is actually much more invasive

than the core data,

because in the core data

you present yourself as you want to be presented.

With metadata, who knows what the conclusions are

that are drawn?

Is there anything to that?

RL: I don't really understand that argument.

I think that metadata's important for a couple of reasons.

Metadata is the information that lets you

find connections that people are trying to hide.

So when a terrorist is corresponding

with somebody else who's not known to us

but is engaged in doing or supporting terrorist activity,

or someone who's violating international sanctions

by providing nuclear weapons-related material

to a country like Iran or North Korea,

is trying to hide that activity because it's illicit activity.

What metadata lets you do is connect that.

The alternative to that

is one that's much less efficient

and much more invasive of privacy,

which is gigantic amounts of content collection.

So metadata, in that sense,

actually is privacy-enhancing.

And we don't, contrary to some of the stuff

that's been printed,

we don't sit there and grind out

metadata profiles of average people.

If you're not connected

to one of those valid intelligence targets,

you are not of interest to us.

CA: So in terms of the threats

that face America overall,

where would you place terrorism?

RL: I think terrorism is still number one.

I think that we have never been in a time

where there are more places

where things are going badly

and forming the petri dish in which terrorists

take advantage of the lack of governance.

An old boss of mine, Tom Fargo, Admiral Fargo,

used to describe it as arcs of instability.

And so you have a lot of those arcs of instability

in the world right now,

in places like Syria, where there's a civil war

going on and you have massive numbers,

thousands and thousands of foreign fighters

who are coming into Syria

to learn how to be terrorists

and practice that activity,

and lots of those people are Westerners

who hold passports to European countries

or in some cases the United States,

and so they are basically learning how

to do jihad and have expressed intent

to go out and do that later on

in their home countries.

You've got places like Iraq,

which is suffering from a high level of sectarian violence,

again a breeding ground for terrorism.

And you have the activity in the Horn of Africa

and the Sahel area of Africa.

Again, lots of weak governance

which forms a breeding ground for terrorist activity.

So I think it's very serious. I think it's number one.

I think number two is cyber threat.

I think cyber is a threat in three ways:

One way, and probably the most common way

that people have heard about it,

is due to the theft of intellectual property,

so basically, foreign countries going in,

stealing companies' secrets,

and then providing that information

to state-owned enterprises

or companies connected to the government

to help them leapfrog technology

or to gain business intelligence

that's then used to win contracts overseas.

That is a hugely costly set of activities that's going on right now.

Several nation-states are doing it.

Second is the denial-of-service attacks.

You're probably aware that there have been

a spate of those directed against

the U.S. financial sector since 2012.

Again, that's a nation-state who is executing those attacks,

and they're doing that

as a semi-anonymous way of reprisal.

And the last one is destructive attacks,

and those are the ones that concern me the most.

Those are on the rise.

You have the attack against Saudi Aramco in 2012,

August of 2012.

It took down about 35,000 of their computers

with a Wiper-style virus.

You had a follow-on a week later

to a Qatari company.

You had March of 2013,

you had a South Korean attack

that was attributed in the press to North Korea

that took out thousands of computers.

Those are on the rise,

and we see people expressing interest

in those capabilities

and a desire to employ them.

CA: Okay, so a couple of things here,

because this is really the core of this, almost.

I mean, first of all,

a lot of people who look at risk

and look at the numbers

don't understand this belief that terrorism

is still the number one threat.

Apart from September 11,

I think the numbers are that in the last 30 or 40 years

about 500 Americans have died from terrorism,

mostly from homegrown terrorists.

The chance in the last few years

of being killed by terrorism

is far less than the chance of being killed by lightning.

I guess you would say that a single nuclear incident

or bioterrorism act or something like that

would change those numbers.

Would that be the point of view?

RL: Well, I'd say two things.

One is, the reason that there hasn't been

a major attack in the United States since 9/11,

that is not an accident.

That's a lot of hard work that we have done,

that other folks

in the intelligence community have done,

that the military has done,

and that our allies around the globe have done.

You've heard the numbers about

the tip of the iceberg in terms

of numbers of terrorist attacks that NSA programs

contributed to stopping was 54,

25 of those in Europe,

and of those 25,

18 of them occurred in three countries,

some of which are our allies,

and some of which are beating the heck out of us

over the NSA programs, by the way.

So that's not an accident that those things happen.

That's hard work. That's us finding intelligence

on terrorist activities

and interdicting them through one way or another,

through law enforcement,

through cooperative activities with other countries

and sometimes through military action.

The other thing I would say is that

your idea of nuclear or chem-bio-threat

is not at all far-fetched

and in fact there are a number of groups

who have for several years expressed interest

and desire in obtaining those capabilities

and work towards that.

CA: It's also been said that,

of those 54 alleged incidents,

that as few as zero of them

were actually anything to do

with these controversial programs

that Mr. Snowden revealed,

that it was basically through other forms of intelligence,

that you're looking for a needle in a haystack,

and the effects of these programs,

these controversial programs,

is just to add hay to the stack,

not to really find the needle.

The needle was found by other methods.

Isn't there something to that?

RL: No, there's actually two programs

that are typically implicated in that discussion.

One is the section 215 program,

the U.S. telephony metadata program,

and the other one is

popularly called the PRISM program,

and it's actually section 702 of the FISA Amendment Act.

But the 215 program

is only relevant to threats

that are directed against the United States,

and there have been a dozen threats

where that was implicated.

Now what you'll see people say publicly

is there is no "but for" case,

and so there is no case where, but for that,

the threat would have happened.

But that actually indicates a lack of understanding

of how terrorist investigations actually work.

You think about on television,

you watch a murder mystery.

What do you start with? You start with a body,

and then they work their way from there to solve the crime.

We're actually starting well before that,

hopefully before there are any bodies,

and we're trying to build the case for

who the people are, what they're trying to do,

and that involves massive amounts of information.

Think of it is as mosaic,

and it's hard to say that any one piece of a mosaic

was necessary to building the mosaic,

but to build the complete picture,

you need to have all the pieces of information.

On the other, the non-U.S.-related threats out of those 54,

the other 42 of them,

the PRISM program was hugely relevant to that,

and in fact was material in contributing

to stopping those attacks.

CA: Snowden said two days ago

that terrorism has always been

what is called in the intelligence world

"a cover for action,"

that it's something that,

because it invokes such a powerful

emotional response in people,

it allows the initiation of these programs

to achieve powers that an organization like yours

couldn't otherwise have.

Is there any internal debate about that?

RL: Yeah.

I mean, we debate these things all the time,

and there is discussion that goes on

in the executive branch

and within NSA itself

and the intelligence community about

what's right, what's proportionate,

what's the correct thing to do.

And it's important to note that the programs

that we're talking about

were all authorized by two different presidents,

two different political parties,

by Congress twice,

and by federal judges 16 different times,

and so this is not NSA running off

and doing its own thing.

This is a legitimate activity

of the United States foreign government

that was agreed to by all the branches

of the United States government,

and President Madison would have been proud.

CA: And yet, when congressmen discovered

what was actually being done with that authorization,

many of them were completely shocked.

Or do you think that is not a legitimate reaction,

that it's only because it's now come out publicly,

that they really knew exactly what you were doing

with the powers they had granted you?

RL: Congress is a big body.

There's 535 of them,

and they change out frequently,

in the case of the House, every two years,

and I think that the NSA provided

all the relevant information to our oversight committees,

and then the dissemination of that information

by the oversight committees throughout Congress

is something that they manage.

I think I would say that Congress members

had the opportunity to make themselves aware,

and in fact a significant number of them,

the ones who are assigned oversight responsibility,

did have the ability to do that.

And you've actually had the chairs of those committees say that in public.

CA: Now, you mentioned the threat of cyberattacks,

and I don't think anyone in this room would disagree

that that is a huge concern,

but do you accept that there's a tradeoff

between offensive and defensive strategies,

and that it's possible that the very measures taken

to, "weaken encryption,"

and allow yourself to find the bad guys,

might also open the door to forms of cyberattack?

RL: So I think two things.

One is, you said weaken encryption. I didn't.

And the other one is that

the NSA has both of those missions,

and we are heavily biased towards defense,

and, actually, the vulnerabilities that we find

in the overwhelming majority of cases,

we disclose to the people who are responsible

for manufacturing or developing those products.

We have a great track record of that,

and we're actually working on a proposal right now

to be transparent and to publish transparency reports

in the same way that the Internet companies

are being allowed to publish transparency reports for them.

We want to be more transparent about that.

So again, we eat our own dog food.

We use the standards, we use the products

that we recommend,

and so it's in our interest

to keep our communications protected

in the same way that other people's need to be.

CA: Edward Snowden,

when, after his talk, was wandering the halls here

in the bot,

and I heard him say to a couple of people,

they asked him about what he thought

of the NSA overall,

and he was very complimentary about the people

who work with you,

said that it's a really

impassioned group of employees

who are seeking to do the right thing,

and that the problems have come from

just some badly conceived policies.

He came over certainly very reasonably and calmly.

He didn't come over like a crazy man.

Would you accept that at least,

even if you disagree with how he did it,

that he has opened a debate that matters?

RL: So I think that the discussion

is an important one to have.

I do not like the way that he did it.

I think there were a number of other ways

that he could have done that

that would have not endangered our people

and the people of other nations

through losing visibility

into what our adversaries are doing.

But I do think it's an important conversation.

CA: It's been reported that there's

almost a difference of opinion

with you and your colleagues

over any scenario in which

he might be offered an amnesty deal.

I think your boss, General Keith Alexander,

has said that that would be a terrible example

for others;

you can't negotiate with someone

who's broken the law in that way.

But you've been quoted as saying that,

if Snowden could prove that he was surrendering

all undisclosed documents,

that a deal maybe should be considered.

Do you still think that?

RL: Yeah, so actually,

this is my favorite thing about that "60 Minutes" interview

was all the misquotes that came from that.

What I actually said, in response to a question about,

would you entertain any discussions

of mitigating action against Snowden,

I said, yeah, it's worth a conversation.

This is something that the attorney general

of the United States and the president also

actually have both talked about this,

and I defer to the attorney general,

because this is his lane.

But there is a strong tradition

in American jurisprudence

of having discussions with people

who have been charged with crimes in order to,

if it benefits the government,

to get something out of that,

that there's always room for that kind of discussion.

So I'm not presupposing any outcome,

but there is always room for discussion.

CA: To a lay person it seems like

he has certain things to offer the U.S.,

the government, you, others,

in terms of putting things right

and helping figure out a smarter policy,

a smarter way forward for the future.

Do you see, has that kind of possibility

been entertained at all?

RL: So that's out of my lane.

That's not an NSA thing.

That would be a Department of Justice

sort of discussion.

I'll defer to them.

CA: Rick, when Ed Snowden ended his talk,

I offered him the chance to share an idea worth spreading.

What would be your idea worth spreading

for this group?

RL: So I think, learn the facts.

This is a really important conversation,

and it impacts, it's not just NSA,

it's not just the government,

it's you, it's the Internet companies.

The issue of privacy and personal data

is much bigger than just the government,

and so learn the facts.

Don't rely on headlines,

don't rely on sound bites,

don't rely on one-sided conversations.

So that's the idea, I think, worth spreading.

We have a sign, a badge tab,

we wear badges at work with lanyards,

and if I could make a plug,

my badge lanyard at work says, "Dallas Cowboys."

Go Dallas.

I've just alienated half the audience, I know.

So the lanyard that our people

who work in the organization

that does our crypto-analytic work

have a tab that says, "Look at the data."

So that's the idea worth spreading.

Look at the data.

CA: Rick, it took a certain amount of courage,

I think, actually, to come and speak openly

to this group.

It's not something the NSA has done a lot of in the past,

and plus the technology has been challenging.

We truly appreciate you doing that

and sharing in this very important conversation.

Thank you so much.

RL: Thanks, Chris.

(Applause)