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294 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS NSA analytic reports.” From the continued use of these intercepted channels by suspected terrorists on the NSA’s watch lists, it could be reasonably assumed that these users were unaware of the NSA‘s capacity to intercept their messages on the unencrypted Internet. Unlike the telephone program that Snowden revealed, the PRISM program produced actionable intelligence until the time when Snowden blew it. General Hayden, who was NSA director during the three years following the 9/11 attack, wrote that these surveil- lance powers, among other things, “uncovered illicit financing net- works, detected suspect travel, discovered ties to aviation schools, linked transportation employees to associates of terrorists, drew connections to the illicit purchases of arms, tied U.S. persons to Kha- lid Sheikh Mohammed, and discovered a suspect terrorist on the no-fly list who was already in the United States.” More specifically, just between 2007 and 2013, according to the testimony of NSA and FBI officials, it resulted in the preempting of at least forty-five ter- rorist attacks. Almost all of the thwarted attacks occurred outside the jurisdiction of the United States, and therefore did not result in ) USS. prosecutions. One of the plots that targeted Americans was a © planned attack using high explosives on the subways in Grand Cen- tral station and the Times Square station at rush hour in New York City in 2009. It was averted after British intelligence supplied the NSA with the e-mail address of the terrorist suspect Najibullah Zazi in Aurora, Colorado. The PRISM surveillance program then traced it to an IP address on the watch list associated with Rashid Rauf, an al- Qaeda bomb maker in Pakistan. Zazi, evidently unaware that e-mails sent via Yahoo! could be intercepted before they were encrypted by Yahoo!, continued sending e-mails to Rauf as he prepared to assemble the bombs in early September 2009. As a result, the NSA search of its database yielded e-mails from Zazi discussing the pro- portions of explosives to be used. These e-mails recovered through the PRISM program, according to an analysis done for the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2014, provided the “critical lead” that led to the arrest of Zazi and his confederates before they could detonate bombs in the subways of New York City. The members of the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence had no doubt that the 702 program played a key role in aborting this plot they had been | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 294 ® 9/30/16 11:09 AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019782