9/20 Session #6: What Bechtold Was Told

Walid Bin Attash’s lawyer, Cheryl Bormann, will question the long-testifying witness, Ronald Bechtold.

She’s interested in the basis for his testimony, and his declaration.  The lawyer asks, and the witness confirms, he’s testified to things that, in fact, are accomplished in the first instance by subordinates---Brent Glover and others.  So his views rely on the accuracy, in some cases, of information given to him by those subordinates.  One, for example, had notified Bechtold of the defense’s serious difficulties with IT insecurity in April of 2013.  Prior to that, the witness didn’t know of problems with shared drives.  The latter have latency issues, meaning that users experience greater delays between data transmissions between Guantanamo to mainland servers than, say, data transmissions between the Pentagon and those servers.  (Both measure in the milliseconds.)   Thus replication: the idea was to speed up access between GTMO and D.C.

Apropos, does Bechtold know what caused the December 2012-March 2013 server outages?  No, he doesn’t, and he doesn’t know who shut down the servers, either. He was not advised, he says, that DoD IT personnel were responsible---though that doesn’t strike Bechtold as relevant.  All that matters is that a server outage occurred, and that it needed fixing.  Bormann refers to prior testimony this week by Scott Parr, Military Commissions IT guy, about the mechanics---or suspected mechanics---behind the December-March data disruption.  Bechtold is reluctant to challenge Parr’s explanation, but thinks there was obviously a knowledge gap in play.  In any case, he takes it on faith that, as he was told, user files appeared and disappeared during the incident.  His task, since then, has been figuring out what happened.  When Bormann asks, Bechtold acknowledges that there are not so-called “full backups” of some files compromised.  Has Bechtold’s shop ever responded to defense inquiries, about signing non-disclosure agreements for forensic work on defense servers?  Bechtold explains that he was reluctant to alter the standard, boilerplate DoD agreement; he is skittish about creating what he calls “one-offs.”  That’s not enough for Bormann: she’s been waiting on a solution for months, waiting to tender 57 privileged items to a tech person who could help her.  She thus asks the witness to hurry up with the non-disclosure process.

Investigative Search Request (“ISR”) time.  Bechtold wasn’t advised about the handing over of defense emails to prosecutors in the Al-Qosi case, after the former were swept up inappropriately by an ISR. But Bormann shows the witness a draft version of his declaration; this contains no language about segregation, quarantining, and deletion of collected Al-Qosi ISR search results, whereas the final version includes such language.  What about this, or about similarly discrepant accounts of defense data lost during replication?   Bechtold acknowledges his changes, and explains them.  For example, it wasn’t known to him that all data lost pertained to the defense, at the time he wrote his declaration.  Thus his language tweak.

Some more follows, among other things on the details surrounding a staff meeting convened by Bechtold, to address IT problems---including replication and the exposure of privileged data. Here again, Bormann suggests, and Bechtold acknowledges, that the latter relied on his staff to present facts needed to do the addressing.  The witness speculates about who he could have called here---but doesn’t seem to recall precisely.  Bormann wraps up.

An air-casted CDR Walter Ruiz, lawyer for Mustafa al-Hawsawi, half-limps to the podium and questions the witness.  In April 2012, Ruiz’s defense analyst’s computer was electronically searched; Bechtold has said that this shouldn’t have happened, and reaffirms as much.  He would have been upset, and says the incident troubles him.  So Bechtold was never aware that a defense team had its electronic files searched, ever?  Right, answers Bechtold.  He only learned of the snafu yesterday.  And the witness doesn’t know who contacted Ruiz’s analyst, either, but shares the defense lawyer’s desire to find out. Ruiz presses more on the search of the analyst’s folders, and Bechtold’s prior claim that, so far as he is aware, no content-monitoring goes on.  The latter simply can’t speak to things he doesn’t know.  But he says that nobody is monitoring defense communications.  The lawyer then sternly questions the witness about his edits to his draft declaration---which were made in email correspondence with prosecutors.   Bechtold says his responses did not convey any puppeteering by the government; he was just being chatty and casual, and working collaboratively.