The twenty day countdown starts Monday February 7, 2005 and ends Monday February 28, 2005.

NSA/CSS FOIA Appeal Authority
(DC34), National Security Agency
9800 Savage Road STE 6248, Fort
George G. Meade, MD 20755-6248
nsapao@nsa.gov

Re: FOIA Case 42493D

Dear FOIA Appeal Authority:

Purposes of this letter are to

1 appeal being given only partial contents of EX PARTE IN CAMERA CLASSIFIED DECLARATION OF GARY W. WINCH dated 26 July 1998

2 point out that Winch misled the court in his verified declaration

3 suggest that NSA inform the American public about its covert channel activities so that perhaps some can come up with a peaceful settlement solution.

Some of the information deleted from the documents was found to be currently and properly classified in accordance with Executive Order 12958, as amended. This information meets the criteria for classification as set forth in Subparagraphs (c) and (g) of Section 1.4 and remains classified TOP SECRET as provided in Section 1.2 of the Executive Order. The information Is classified because Its disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security. Because the information is currently and properly classified, it is exempt from disclosure pursuant to the first exemption of the FOIA [5 U.S.C. Section 552(b)(1)]

5 U.S.C. Section 552(b)(1) seen at http://assembler.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode05/usc_sec_05_00000552----000-.html states

(b) This section does not apply to matters that are-

(1)

(A) specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and (B) are in fact properly classified pursuant to such Executive order;

I have prepared this declaration to explain, in more detail than is possible in a public declaration, why the withheld information -- the fact of the existence or non-existence of Iranian or Libyan messages and translations between January 1, 1980 and June 10, 1996 -- must be withheld pursuant to exemptions one and three of the FOlA.

Exemption three of the FOIA states

(3) specifically exempted from disclosure by statute (other than section 552b of this title), provided that such statute

A) requires that the matters be withheld from the public in such a manner as to leave no discretion on the issue, or
(B) establishes particular criteria for withholding or refers to particular types of matters to be withheld;

You may realize Executive Order 12958 seen at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030325-11.html states

Sec. 1.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations. (a) In no case shall information be classified in order to:
(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error;
(2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency;
(3) restrain competition; or
(4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.
(b) Basic scientific research information not clearly related to the national security shall not be classified.
(c) Information may be reclassified after declassification and release to the public under proper authority only in accordance with the following conditions:
(1) the reclassification action is taken under the personal authority of the agency head or deputy agency head, who determines in writing that the reclassification of the information is necessary in the interest of the national security;
(2) the information may be reasonably recovered; and …

International public awareness of interception of Libyan messages was made by president Ronald Reagan on November 2, 1997 at http://www.aci.net/kalliste/speccoll.htm

First, U.S. President Ronald Reagan informed the world on national television that the United States was reading Libyan communications. This admission was part of a speech justifying the retaliatory bombing of Libya for its alleged involvement in the La Belle discotheque bombing in Berlin's Schoeneberg district, where two U.S. soldiers and a Turkish woman were killed, and 200 others injured. Reagan wasn't talking about American monitoring of Libyan news broadcasts. Rather, his "direct, precise, and undeniable proof" referred to secret (encrypted) diplomatic communication between Tripoli and the Libyan embassy in East Berlin

about 5 months prior to Winch's 26 July 1998 declaration.

The same publication stated

Next, this leak was compounded by the U.S. demonstration that it was also reading secret Iranian communications. As reported in Switzerland's Neue Zurcher Zeitung, the U.S. provided the contents of encrypted Iranian messages to France to assist in the conviction of Ali Vakili Rad and Massoud Hendi for the stabbing death in the Paris suburb of Suresnes of the former Iranian prime minister Shahpour Bakhtiar and his personal secretary Katibeh Fallouch. [2]

Earlier on May 15, 1994 Swiss Radio International broadcast to the international community

The Iranians where clearly mad about something. From the record of the interrogations given in the book we get an idea of what it was. [A ghost voice meant to represent an interrogator:]

You gave many to the Iranians being trained in Switzerland. You called it poker money but its corruption. In return they told you the codes we where using. Who did you pass these codes on to? You built up a network of agents in Iran. We know it. What is the connection between Crypto and Siemens? Don't try and hide things. You tell the Americans which codes the Libyans where using.

Mason: It seems the Iranians where convinced someone was reading their supposedly secure and secret communications. In the Swiss television documentary, a former Crypto engineer made a sensational allegation. For his own safety he wonted to remain anonymous and the program makers reconstructed the intervju. [xxx check spelling of "intervju]

[A voice in German says a few meanings, then the voice fades out. A ghost voice says:]

The Iranians had probably long suspected they had been sold manipulating enciphering machines although i don't know if Mr Buehler was aware of what was going on. Of course nobody at Crypto was official supposed to know about the manipulation, although many people suspected it, and a few actually knew about it. I know proof exists that foreign intelligence services, that is; the Germans and Americans, fixed Crypto's machines in such a way that they could read the traffic being sent. I was actually connected with such manipulation programs. If I haven't been naturally there was no way I got to hear about it. People came down from Bad Godesberg in Germany with so called enciphering programs that determined the coding process in cipher machines, or people came over from the states from the government electronic divisions in Arizona. That's the Americans secret services counterpart to the Bad Godesberg outfit.

It took some time before I was 100 % certain about what was going on. I deposited the proof; that is the technical data and the manipulated enciphering programs in a bank safe. Then I alerted the federal authorities in Bern. I had many meetings with them but suddenly contacts where broken of, and the whole business came to a halt.

[The German voice continues, tells a few meanings, and fades out]

Mason: It has always been thought that Crypto was a Swiss company. But researchers traced the major shareholder to a company in Liechtenstein. The trail then led to a trust company in Munich. And the government department suspected to being a cover for the German intelligence services, the Bundes Nachtrichten Dienst. The documentary also pointed out that Crypto had close connection with the German electronic trans, Siemens.

Another former Crypto employee, who used to work in the company's finance department, and who also wanted to remain anonymous made this revelation on television.

[A German voice tells a few meanings, then fading out. A ghost voice says:]

Neither the Siemens nor the trust company owned shares in Crypto. The real owner of the shares is the federal republic of Germany. In particular, the federal estates administration.

Mason: By now it was clear what was being said. Crypto's machines was being fixed so that western intelligence agencies could read messages being sent. …

Read transcript at http://biphome.spray.se/laszlob/cryptoag/buehler-tape.htm.

No Such Agency Part Four - Rigging the Game The Baltimore Sun, December 10, 1995, pp. 9-11 states

Spy Sting: Few at the Swiss factory knew the mysterious visitors were pulling off a stunning intelligence coup -- perhaps the most audacious in the National Security Agency's long war on foreign codes.

By Scott Shane and Tom Bowman, Sun Staff

Zug, Switzerland. For four decades, the Swiss flag that flies in front of Crypto AG has lured customers from around the world to this company in the lake dis- [words missing] most sensitive diplomatic and military communications value Switzerland's reputation for business secrecy and political neutrality. Some 120 nations have bought their encryption machines here.

But behind that flag, America's National Security Agency hid what may be the intelligence sting of the century. For years, NSA secretly rigged Crypto AG machines so that U.S. eavesdroppers could easily break their codes, according to former company employees whose story is supported by company documents.

The value to NSA of such an intelligence windfall is hard to exaggerate. For NSA effortlessly to read coded messages between top officials of many countries is the equivalent of recruiting reliable spies in key government posts around the world, receiving minute-by-minute reports from them and never risking that they will be unmasked.

NSA appears to have pulled off an international sleight of hand as brazen and brilliant as the original Trojan horse by winning the covert cooperation of the Swiss firm. Wary of encryption companies in NATO countries, the suspicious governments of such prime U.S. targets as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Yugoslavia bought equipment from Crypto AG (or Crypto Inc.). They never imagined that when they coded their messages with the Swiss machines, they may have been sending an easily unscrambled copy directly to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade.

Many details of the arrangements between Crypto and NSA are not known, including when the rigging began, whether it has ended and which machines were involved. The whole story will he told only when secret U.S. documents are declassified, probably well into the next century.

Crypto rejects the rigging allegations as an invention by disgruntled former employees and denies that its machines were ever designed or altered according to the suggestions of American spies. After reports of cooperation with Western intelligence surfaced in the Swiss press last year, the company wrote to its customers that "manipulation of Crypto AG equipment is absolutely excluded."

But a different tale is told by an accumulation of evidence, including a document obtained by The Sun showing that an NSA cryptographer attended a meeting with Crypto personnel to discuss the design of new machines.

The extraordinary story of Crypto AG is only one example of NSA's 40-year campaign to bypass, break or steal the foreign codes that are the main obstacle to the agency's eavesdropping.

The contest between code-makers and code-breakers dates back many centuries. But NSA has taken the game to unprecedented levels of effort, expenditure and deception.

The agency has amassed the world's largest concentration of supercomputers to produce the number-crunching power necessary to break foreign codes. It has dispatched FBI agents on break-in missions to snatch code books from foreign facilities in the United States, and CIA agents to recruit foreign communications clerks and buy their code secrets, according to veteran intelligence officials.

The agency has imposed secrecy orders on U.S. scientists to prevent them from publishing code-making breakthroughs that might be exploited abroad. It has designed the so-called Clipper chip, an encryption device that would scramble telephone calls to foil eavesdroppers -- except FBI and NSA agents with a warrant who could obtain the secret numeric "keys" to unlock the code.

And NSA has pressured American encryption companies to rig their own machines to permit U.S. eavesdropping, as Crypto is alleged to have done, in return for the export licenses the agency controls.

Today, NSA's need for rigged machines and pilfered code books is greater than ever. An era of inexpensive, virtually unbreakable encryption appears to be imminent. The ancient art of using codes to keep secrets is spreading beyond governments to banks, multinational corporations drug cartels and terrorist groups.

"The window that the U.S. has had to read the communications of other countries is closing," says Stephen T. Walker, a software engineer who began his career at NSA and whose company sells encryption programs.

"The advent of electronic communications opened that window. In World War II, it was incredibly valuable. But technology is closing that window," he says.

In an ironic turnabout, technologies NSA practically invented, in codes, computers and communications, now threaten its mission.

Fiber-optic cable is rapidly replacing microwave transmission as the favored route for telephone traffic.

While a microwave dish or satellite can easily pluck messages from the air, tapping fiber usually requires physical placement of a bug. That's impractical on the scale of NSA's global net.

"When you take something off microwave relay and put it on fiber-optic, basically it's lost [to NSA]," says intelligence expert Jeffrey T. Richelson.

And the communications boom itself threatens to overwhelm NSA's eavesdroppers, who face a problem comparable to performing a chemical analysis of certain interesting drops of water in the Niagara River as it roars over the falls.

Increasingly, the challenge for NSA is merely to isolate terrorists' telephonic plotting from Aunt Olga's birthday calls and faxed orders for olive oil.

"It's going to be a lot tougher for NSA in the future," says retired Adm. Tom Brooks, an NSA veteran, former director of naval intelligence and now an AT&T Corp. executive.

"They're going to have to work a lot harder to do what they've done in the past." he says.

Yet codes have always been the eavesdroppers' most daunting obstacle.

Despite its mathematical brain trust and formidable supercomputers, former intelligence officials say, NSA rarely managed to break the most secure codes of the Soviet Union -- a country, after all, known for its mathematicians and chess masters.

Against lesser opponents, the cryptanalysts at Fort Meade are like a baseball team with good years and bad, runs of incredible luck against particular opponents and endless strings of losses against others.

One NSA analyst recalls that in 1981 the number of translators working on Turkey suddenly shrank from about 25 people to 10.

"I said, 'What the hell's going on?' They said. 'We can't break the new Turkish code.' " he says.

NSA's spectacular success in breaking codes used by the Sandinista government in Nicaragua suddenly ended, a former diplomat recalls, when a shipment of first-class Soviet encryption equipment reached Managua, the capital, and was installed.

When the code-breakers are stumped, NSA draws on the entire arsenal of U.S. espionage.

Sometimes a bug planted in just the right place can help. In a celebrated NSA operation code-named Ivy Bells, divers placed a tap on a Soviet communications cable on the ocean floor north of Japan.

Believing the line secure, the Soviets used weak encryption or none at all. NSA gleaned invaluable weapons data until the operation was betrayed to the KGB by Ronald W. Pelton, an NSA analyst turned Soviet spy, in 1981.

American spies are always on the lookout to steal or purchase cipher manuals and machines.

When foreign code clerks can't be bribed, NSA hopes they become lazy, forgetting to switch a machine to encryption mode or weakening the code by failing to change the numeric "keys" for months on end.

Yet these piecemeal tactics cannot compare with the case involving Crypto.

The customers might see it as consumer fraud on a global scale. But from Washington, it must have seemed an ingenious spying scheme whose benefits could accrue to the United States for decades. …

The Baltimore Sun article published about two and one half years prior to Winch's 26 July 1998 declaration.

From the text of the NSA FOIA lawsuit seen at http://www.jya.com/nsasuit.txt

NSA employee Tom White was Payne's NSA liaison contact for the US/USSR seismic data authenticator. White told Payne in 1986 that NSA regarded Ronald Reagan as America's greatest traitor. For the reason Reagan announced to the world that the US was reading supposedly-secret communications.

Sec. 1.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations.

(a) In no case shall information be classified in order to:

(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error;
(2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency;
...

(c) Information may be reclassified after declassification and release to the public under proper authority only in accordance with the following conditions:

(1) the reclassification action is taken under the personal authority of the agency head or deputy agency head, who determines in writing that the reclassification of the information is necessary in the interest of the national security;
(2) the information may be reasonably recovered; and ... which cannot be classified or the information reasonably recovered. …

Grabbe at http://www.aci.net/kalliste/speccoll.htm writes

The role of NSA in the conflict is an open secret in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Only in this country has there been a relative news blackout, despite the fact that it was the U.S. administration that let the crypto cat out of the bag.

So I appeal to receive a complete copy [no parts redacted] of EX PARTE IN CAMERA CLASSIFIED DECLARATION OF GARY W. WINCH dated 26 July 1998 since it cannot be properly classified and may contain more misleading statements.

Let's address purpose 3.

NSA got caught.

President Ronald Reagan blew the whistle on NSA.

Mr Larry Everest documents the big picture of what happened at http://www.nmol.com/users/billp/larryeverest.htm.

Internet has changed who controls information and how it is disemminated.

Perhaps NSA should come clean and post on Internet

"Iranian or Libyan messages and translations between January 1,1980 and June 10, 1996"

so that the American public can more fully understand the operation of its government?

Giles wrote on January 4, 2005

The NSA/CSS Appeal Authority will endeavor to respond to the appeal within 20 working days after receipt, absent any unusual circumstances.

Perhaps it would be advisable for NSA to post the requested documents within 20 working days of receipt of this appeal letter?

Regards
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/bpayne37/dw/index.html#salmon
http://www.nmol.com/users/billp/larryeverest.htm#fushimi

William H. Payne
13015 Calle de Sandias NE
Albuquerque, NM 87111
505-292-7037

Rep.: U.S. Measures Lack Broad Approach

By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer

The threat of a terrorist with a nuclear weapon is an. urgent problem that requires a concerted U.S. government response, - Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., said Wednesday.

"Nuclear proliferation" no longer merely means new nations getting nuclear weapons, but now must also include the risk of terrorists getting them, according to a House Policy Committee report released Wednesday

Wilson, who chaired the group that prepared the report, said in a telephone interview that the ultimate nightmare is a nuclear weapon in terrorists' hands. But it is not the only threat, she said. Among the other risks:

o Rogue states getting nuclear weapons.

o The collapse of a government that has nuclear weapons.

o Regime change in a state that has nuclear power, allowing the new government to more quickly make the leap to nuclear weapons. The United States is among eight nations either known or believed to have nuclear weapons. Others include Pakistan and India, the most recent entrants to the nuclear club, and Israel, which is believed to have nuclear weapons but has never admitted it. Britain, France, Russia and China also have nuclear arsenals.

North Korea and Iran are mentioned as countries that may be trying to develop a nuclear arsenal Wilson chairs the House Policy Committee's Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, which prepared the report.

Wilson, in a telephone interview Wednesday, said the United States has had some success enforcing nonproliferation policies. The U.S. government, for example, helped shut down a nuclear technology black market in Pakistan, and U.S. forces now have permission to board Liberian and Panamanian ships to see if they are carrying clandestine nuclear cargo.

But the U.S. initiatives lack a "comprehensive approach," Wilson said.

Wilson said the world com- munity faces two critical chal- lenges. The first is to prevent the emergence of new nuclear- weapons states. The second is to make sure nuclear material and know-how are not trans- ferred to terrorists.

Nuclear deterrence can be sufficient to prevent a nation from mounting a nuclear attack, she said, but that will not work with terrorists.

"Those groups are not deterrable," she said.

International arms control treaties should be used, she said, but added, "They are not enough."

Treaties, for example, did not prevent India and Pakistan from developing nuclear weapons when they decided it was in their interest to deal with regional threats.

"The nations that actively seek nuclear weapons have been largely uninterested in limiting their efforts or in hon- oring agreements," the report said.

Among the steps to be taken, Wilson said, are assuring U.S. allies that they will be protect- ed by the United States' nuclear arsenal so they will not feel the need to develop their own weapons.

Technology and intelligence networks to detect clandestine nuclear work also must be improved, the report says.

WASHINGTON - Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., was dropped from the House Armed Services Committee this week, but she will return to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence where she first served in the late 1990s.

Wilson, who also serves on the House Energy ~nd Com- merce Committee, will chair the intelligence panel's Sub- committee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence.

The congresswoman had sought to continue service on the Armed Services Commit- tee, but she was unable to get a "waiver~~ to serve on both coin- mittees from Rep. Joe Barton, R-Ibxas, who is chairman of the House energy panel.

Wilson, an Air Force Acade- my graduate, said she is excit- ed about moving to the intern- gence committee, which has taken on a much higher profile role in Congress since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The committee has some oversight of the nuclear weapons work performed at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico, Wilson said.

"I'm very, very happy to get back to intelligence and partic- ularly honored to be given a subcommittee chairmanship," Wilson said.