HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019785.jpg

The "War on Terror" After Snowden | 297

or phone lines more freely if Snowden had not divulged the NSA's
surveillance of them, but there can be little doubt that his breach
of the secrecy envelope had serious consequences for U.S., French,
and British intelligence. For example, François Molins, the former
head prosecutor of Paris, pointed out that after the Paris attacks the
French investigation had run into an obstacle: end-to-end encryp-
tion. "We can't penetrate into certain conversations," he said about
"Telegram," the end-to-end encryption program that Snowden had
repeatedly recommended, and as a result "we're dealing with this
gigantic black hole, a dark zone where there are just so many dan-
gerous things going on."
The effects of Snowden's intervention were soon realized by the
CIA, according to Michael Morell, who had closely followed intel-
ligence about terrorist groups in the Middle East ever since he had
acted as the CIA's briefer for the president on the day of the 9/11
attack. "Terrorist organizations around the world were already start-
ing to modify their actions in light of what Snowden disclosed,"
Morell wrote in 2015. "Within weeks of the [Snowden] leaks, com-
munications sources dried up, tactics were changed." Even more
disturbing, suspects on the CIA's watch list began switching to an
"encryption platform." Instead of continuing to rely on the Inter-
net to protect their messages, they increased their use of end-to-end
encryption, which defeated the effectiveness of PRISM's captur-
ing Internet traffic before it was encrypted by Internet companies.
Indeed, after the Snowden breach, ISIS even provided a tutorial on
its websites about using end-to-end encryption. So Morell and oth-
ers at the CIA helplessly watched as this previous source of unex-
pected intelligence went dark.
What further heightened Morell's concern about this sudden loss
of NSA intelligence from these sources was the discovery by the
CIA in January 2014 of two documents, one 26 pages and the other
19 pages, on a captured ISIS computer in Syria. These documents
discussed the advantages of using bubonic plague germs and other
biological weapons against Western civilian populations. They even
provided a religious justification for using biological warfare against
civilian targets in the West. In addition, evidence uncovered from
the safe house used by the ISIS terrorists involved in the Paris attack

Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 297
9/30/16 8:13 AM
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019785