NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds
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NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds
By Barton Gellman, Published: August 15
The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.
Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.
The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.
In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional.
[FISA judge: Ability to police U.S. spying program is limited]
The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA’s compliance record. In June, after promising to explain the NSA’s record in “as transparent a way as we possibly can,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole described extensive safeguards and oversight that keep the agency in check. “Every now and then, there may be a mistake,” Cole said in congressional testimony.
The NSA audit obtained by The Post, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.
In a statement in response to questions for this article, the NSA said it attempts to identify problems “at the earliest possible moment, implement mitigation measures wherever possible, and drive the numbers down.” The government was made aware of The Post’s intention to publish the documents that accompany this article online.
“We’re a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line,” a senior NSA official said in an interview, speaking with White House permission on the condition of anonymity.
“You can look at it as a percentage of our total activity that occurs each day,” he said. “You look at a number in absolute terms that looks big, and when you look at it in relative terms, it looks a little different.”
There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA.
The causes and severity of NSA infractions vary widely. One in 10 incidents is attributed to a typographical error in which an analyst enters an incorrect query and retrieves data about U.S phone calls or e-mails.
But the more serious lapses include unauthorized access to intercepted communications, the distribution of protected content and the use of automated systems without built-in safeguards to prevent unlawful surveillance.
The May 2012 audit, intended for the agency’s top leaders, counts only incidents at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters and other *facilities in the Washington area. Three government officials, speak*ing on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the number would be substantially higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection centers.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who did not receive a copy of the 2012 audit until The Post asked her staff about it, said in a statement late Thursday that the committee “can and should do more to independently verify that NSA’s operations are appropriate, and its reports of compliance incidents are accurate.”
Despite the quadrupling of the NSA’s oversight staff after a series of significant violations in 2009, the rate of infractions increased throughout 2011 and early 2012. An NSA spokesman declined to disclose whether the trend has continued since last year.
One major problem is largely unpreventable, the audit says, because current operations rely on technology that cannot quickly determine whether a foreign mobile phone has entered the United States.
In what appears to be one of the most serious violations, the NSA diverted large volumes of international data passing through fiber-optic cables in the United States into a repository where the material could be stored temporarily for processing and selection.
The operation to obtain what the agency called “multiple communications transactions” collected and commingled U.S. and foreign e-mails, according to an article in SSO News, a top-secret internal newsletter of the NSA’s Special Source Operations unit. NSA lawyers told the court that the agency could not practicably filter out the communications of Americans.
In October 2011, months after the program got underway, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the collection effort was unconstitutional. The court said that the methods used were “deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds,” according to a top-secret summary of the opinion, and it ordered the NSA to comply with standard privacy protections or stop the program.
James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has acknowledged that the court found the NSA in breach of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but the Obama administration has fought a Freedom of Information lawsuit that seeks the opinion.
Generally, the NSA reveals nothing in public about its errors and infractions. The unclassified versions of the administration’s semiannual reports to Congress feature blacked-out pages under the headline “Statistical Data Relating to Compliance Incidents.”
Members of Congress may read the unredacted documents, but only in a special secure room, and they are not allowed to take notes. Fewer than 10 percent of lawmakers employ a staff member who has the security clearance to read the reports and provide advice about their meaning and significance.
The limited portions of the reports that can be read by the public acknowledge “a small number of compliance incidents.”
Under NSA auditing guidelines, the incident count does not usually disclose the number of Americans affected.
“What you really want to know, I would think, is how many innocent U.S. person communications are, one, collected at all, and two, subject to scrutiny,” said Julian Sanchez, a research scholar and close student of the NSA at the Cato Institute.
The documents provided by Snowden offer only glimpses of those questions. Some reports make clear that an unauthorized search produced no records. But a single “incident” in February 2012 involved the unlawful retention of 3,032 files that the surveillance court had ordered the NSA to destroy, according to the May 2012 audit. Each file contained an undisclosed number of telephone call records.
One of the documents sheds new light on a statement by NSA Director Keith B. Alexander last year that “we don’t hold data on U.S. citizens.”
Some Obama administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have defended Alexander with assertions that the agency’s internal definition of “data” does not cover “metadata” such as the trillions of American call records that the NSA is now known to have collected and stored since 2006. Those records include the telephone numbers of the parties and the times and durations of conversations, among other details, but not their content or the names of callers.
The NSA’s authoritative def*inition of data includes those call records. “Signals Intelligence Management Directive 421,” which is quoted in secret oversight and auditing guidelines, states that “raw SIGINT data . . . includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and/or unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice, and some forms of computer-generated data, such as call event records and other Digital Network Intelligence (DNI) metadata as well as DNI message text.”
In the case of the collection effort that confused calls placed from Washington with those placed from Egypt, it is unclear what the NSA meant by a “large number” of intercepted calls. A spokesman declined to discuss the matter.
The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities. The “202” collection was deemed irrelevant to any of them. “The issue pertained to Metadata ONLY so there were no defects to report,” according to the author of the secret memo from March 2013.
The large number of database query incidents, which involve previously collected communications, confirms long-standing suspicions that the NSA’s vast data banks — with code names such as MARINA, PINWALE and XKEYSCORE — house a considerable volume of information about Americans. Ordinarily the identities of people in the United States are masked, but intelligence “customers” may request unmasking, either one case at a time or in standing orders.
In dozens of cases, NSA personnel made careless use of the agency’s extraordinary powers, according to individual auditing reports. One team of analysts in Hawaii, for example, asked a system called DISHFIRE to find any communications that mentioned both the Swedish manufacturer Ericsson and “radio” or “radar” — a query that could just as easily have collected on people in the United States as on their Pakistani military target.
The NSA uses the term “incidental” when it sweeps up the records of an American while targeting a foreigner or a U.S. person who is believed to be involved in terrorism. Official guidelines for NSA personnel say that kind of incident, pervasive under current practices, “does not constitute a . . . violation” and “does not have to be reported” to the NSA inspector general for inclusion in quarterly reports to Congress. Once added to its databases, absent other restrictions, the communications of Americans may be searched freely.
In one required tutorial, NSA collectors and analysts are taught to fill out oversight forms without giving “extraneous information” to “our FAA overseers.” FAA is a reference to the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which granted broad new authorities to the NSA in exchange for regular audits from the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and periodic reports to Congress and the surveillance court.
Using real-world examples, the “Target Analyst Rationale Instructions” explain how NSA employees should strip out details and substitute generic descriptions of the evidence and analysis behind their targeting choices.
“I realize you can read those words a certain way,” said the high-ranking NSA official who spoke with White House authority, but the instructions were not intended to withhold information from auditors. “Think of a book of individual recipes,” he said. Each target “has a short, concise description,” but that is “not a substitute for the full recipe that follows, which our overseers also have access to.”
Julie Tate and Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.
© The Washington Post Company
By Barton Gellman, Published: August 15
The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.
Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.
The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.
In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional.
[FISA judge: Ability to police U.S. spying program is limited]
The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA’s compliance record. In June, after promising to explain the NSA’s record in “as transparent a way as we possibly can,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole described extensive safeguards and oversight that keep the agency in check. “Every now and then, there may be a mistake,” Cole said in congressional testimony.
The NSA audit obtained by The Post, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.
In a statement in response to questions for this article, the NSA said it attempts to identify problems “at the earliest possible moment, implement mitigation measures wherever possible, and drive the numbers down.” The government was made aware of The Post’s intention to publish the documents that accompany this article online.
“We’re a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line,” a senior NSA official said in an interview, speaking with White House permission on the condition of anonymity.
“You can look at it as a percentage of our total activity that occurs each day,” he said. “You look at a number in absolute terms that looks big, and when you look at it in relative terms, it looks a little different.”
There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA.
The causes and severity of NSA infractions vary widely. One in 10 incidents is attributed to a typographical error in which an analyst enters an incorrect query and retrieves data about U.S phone calls or e-mails.
But the more serious lapses include unauthorized access to intercepted communications, the distribution of protected content and the use of automated systems without built-in safeguards to prevent unlawful surveillance.
The May 2012 audit, intended for the agency’s top leaders, counts only incidents at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters and other *facilities in the Washington area. Three government officials, speak*ing on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the number would be substantially higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection centers.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who did not receive a copy of the 2012 audit until The Post asked her staff about it, said in a statement late Thursday that the committee “can and should do more to independently verify that NSA’s operations are appropriate, and its reports of compliance incidents are accurate.”
Despite the quadrupling of the NSA’s oversight staff after a series of significant violations in 2009, the rate of infractions increased throughout 2011 and early 2012. An NSA spokesman declined to disclose whether the trend has continued since last year.
One major problem is largely unpreventable, the audit says, because current operations rely on technology that cannot quickly determine whether a foreign mobile phone has entered the United States.
In what appears to be one of the most serious violations, the NSA diverted large volumes of international data passing through fiber-optic cables in the United States into a repository where the material could be stored temporarily for processing and selection.
The operation to obtain what the agency called “multiple communications transactions” collected and commingled U.S. and foreign e-mails, according to an article in SSO News, a top-secret internal newsletter of the NSA’s Special Source Operations unit. NSA lawyers told the court that the agency could not practicably filter out the communications of Americans.
In October 2011, months after the program got underway, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the collection effort was unconstitutional. The court said that the methods used were “deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds,” according to a top-secret summary of the opinion, and it ordered the NSA to comply with standard privacy protections or stop the program.
James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has acknowledged that the court found the NSA in breach of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but the Obama administration has fought a Freedom of Information lawsuit that seeks the opinion.
Generally, the NSA reveals nothing in public about its errors and infractions. The unclassified versions of the administration’s semiannual reports to Congress feature blacked-out pages under the headline “Statistical Data Relating to Compliance Incidents.”
Members of Congress may read the unredacted documents, but only in a special secure room, and they are not allowed to take notes. Fewer than 10 percent of lawmakers employ a staff member who has the security clearance to read the reports and provide advice about their meaning and significance.
The limited portions of the reports that can be read by the public acknowledge “a small number of compliance incidents.”
Under NSA auditing guidelines, the incident count does not usually disclose the number of Americans affected.
“What you really want to know, I would think, is how many innocent U.S. person communications are, one, collected at all, and two, subject to scrutiny,” said Julian Sanchez, a research scholar and close student of the NSA at the Cato Institute.
The documents provided by Snowden offer only glimpses of those questions. Some reports make clear that an unauthorized search produced no records. But a single “incident” in February 2012 involved the unlawful retention of 3,032 files that the surveillance court had ordered the NSA to destroy, according to the May 2012 audit. Each file contained an undisclosed number of telephone call records.
One of the documents sheds new light on a statement by NSA Director Keith B. Alexander last year that “we don’t hold data on U.S. citizens.”
Some Obama administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have defended Alexander with assertions that the agency’s internal definition of “data” does not cover “metadata” such as the trillions of American call records that the NSA is now known to have collected and stored since 2006. Those records include the telephone numbers of the parties and the times and durations of conversations, among other details, but not their content or the names of callers.
The NSA’s authoritative def*inition of data includes those call records. “Signals Intelligence Management Directive 421,” which is quoted in secret oversight and auditing guidelines, states that “raw SIGINT data . . . includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and/or unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice, and some forms of computer-generated data, such as call event records and other Digital Network Intelligence (DNI) metadata as well as DNI message text.”
In the case of the collection effort that confused calls placed from Washington with those placed from Egypt, it is unclear what the NSA meant by a “large number” of intercepted calls. A spokesman declined to discuss the matter.
The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities. The “202” collection was deemed irrelevant to any of them. “The issue pertained to Metadata ONLY so there were no defects to report,” according to the author of the secret memo from March 2013.
The large number of database query incidents, which involve previously collected communications, confirms long-standing suspicions that the NSA’s vast data banks — with code names such as MARINA, PINWALE and XKEYSCORE — house a considerable volume of information about Americans. Ordinarily the identities of people in the United States are masked, but intelligence “customers” may request unmasking, either one case at a time or in standing orders.
In dozens of cases, NSA personnel made careless use of the agency’s extraordinary powers, according to individual auditing reports. One team of analysts in Hawaii, for example, asked a system called DISHFIRE to find any communications that mentioned both the Swedish manufacturer Ericsson and “radio” or “radar” — a query that could just as easily have collected on people in the United States as on their Pakistani military target.
The NSA uses the term “incidental” when it sweeps up the records of an American while targeting a foreigner or a U.S. person who is believed to be involved in terrorism. Official guidelines for NSA personnel say that kind of incident, pervasive under current practices, “does not constitute a . . . violation” and “does not have to be reported” to the NSA inspector general for inclusion in quarterly reports to Congress. Once added to its databases, absent other restrictions, the communications of Americans may be searched freely.
In one required tutorial, NSA collectors and analysts are taught to fill out oversight forms without giving “extraneous information” to “our FAA overseers.” FAA is a reference to the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which granted broad new authorities to the NSA in exchange for regular audits from the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and periodic reports to Congress and the surveillance court.
Using real-world examples, the “Target Analyst Rationale Instructions” explain how NSA employees should strip out details and substitute generic descriptions of the evidence and analysis behind their targeting choices.
“I realize you can read those words a certain way,” said the high-ranking NSA official who spoke with White House authority, but the instructions were not intended to withhold information from auditors. “Think of a book of individual recipes,” he said. Each target “has a short, concise description,” but that is “not a substitute for the full recipe that follows, which our overseers also have access to.”
Julie Tate and Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.
© The Washington Post Company
4est_4est_Gump
Run Forrest! RUN!
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As long as they were focused on the Tea Party groups, it's all good.
Busybody
We are ALL BUSYBODY!
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Flashback: Obama Says NSA Wasn’t “Actually Abusing” Its Powers…
Yeah, actually they were.
From Obama’s press conference last Friday:
PRESIDENT OBAMA: If you look at the reports, even the disclosures that Mr. Snowden’s put forward, all the stories that have been written, what you’re not reading about is the government actually abusing these programs and, you know, listening in on people’s phone calls or inappropriately reading people’s emails.
What you’re hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused. Now part of the reason they’re not abused is because they’re — these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Sureveillance Court].
Yeah, actually they were.
From Obama’s press conference last Friday:
PRESIDENT OBAMA: If you look at the reports, even the disclosures that Mr. Snowden’s put forward, all the stories that have been written, what you’re not reading about is the government actually abusing these programs and, you know, listening in on people’s phone calls or inappropriately reading people’s emails.
What you’re hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused. Now part of the reason they’re not abused is because they’re — these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Sureveillance Court].
Busybody
We are ALL BUSYBODY!
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Where is curry?
Why is he not in here defending his precious ??
he is being castigated by the LEZ BEEN at the Air farce base
mercury14
Pragmatic Metaphysician
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Where is curry?
Why is he not in here defending his precious ??
I don't defend unauthorized surveillance. If the programming error jacked up area codes, fix it. If the error was due to someone's negligence then go after them.
If these audits are catching things like this then there's actually a watchdog after all, eh?
mercury14
Pragmatic Metaphysician
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dan_c00000
Literotica Guru
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Lawyers said Bush couldn’t spy on Americans. He did it anyway.
By Timothy B. Lee, Updated: June 27, 2013
A remarkable document released by The Guardian gives the public its first in-depth look at the legal process that justified the dragnet surveillance programs undertaken during President George W. Bush’s first term. And they make clear that lots of people involved in the process — government lawyers, judges, and the lawyers of private telecommunications companies — believed the Bush administration had stepped over the legal line.
Former President George W. Bush. (Chip Somodevilla — Getty Images)
The revelations come from a report written by the Office of the Inspector General at the National Security Agency. The document, marked “Top Secret” was leaked to The Guardian by Edward Snowden. It is dated March 24, 2009.
According to the document:
The NSA began targeting communications between the United States and Afghanistan just three days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. When Vice President Dick Cheney asked whether the NSA could be doing more, NSA director Michael Hayden responded that “nothing else could be done with existing NSA authorities.” The NSA found the judicial review process required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act too cumbersome for the broad-ranging surveillance the agency believed was necessary to keep track of terrorist activities.
But rather than asking Congress to amend FISA, President Bush took the law into his own hands on Oct. 4, 2001. He signed an “Authorization,” drafted by vice presidential counsel David Addington, purporting to give the NSA broad authority to intercept telephone and Internet communications if at least one party to the communication was located outside the United States.
The White House Office of Legal counsel wrote a legal opinion defending the legality of wiretapping based on Bush’s Authorization. The White House refused two requests by NSA lawyers to see this document, though Addington did “read a few paragraphs of the opinion” over the phone to NSA General Counsel Robert Deitz. The NSA’s inspector general stated that he found it “strange that NSA was told to execute a secret program that everyone knew presented legal questions, without being told the underpinning legal theory.”
The surveillance required the assistance of private-sector telecommunications companies. While some firms readily agreed to participate, others balked at the idea of violating their customers’ privacy without a court order. The report discusses the NSA’s discussions with seven firms labeled “Company A” through “Company G.” Companies A through D participated in the NSA program. “The Company E General Counsel ultimately decided not to support NSA.” Company F “did not participate because of corporate liability concerns.” The NSA dropped Company G from the program after it insisted on consulting outside counsel before agreeing to participate.
The report says that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was not even informed about this secret surveillance until Jan. 31, 2002, more than three months after the program began. After Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly was sworn in as the Chief Judge of the FISC in May 2002, she was briefed on the program and allowed to read a memo summarizing the White House’s legal justification, but she was not allowed to “retain it for study.”
In March 2004, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice concluded that one part of the NSA’s surveillance program “was prohibited by the terms of FISA and Title III.” Attorney General John Ashcroft and his deputies resisted White House pressure to sign off on the program. But rather than shut down that aspect of the program, the President had the White House Counsel sign an Authorization for the program, instead of the Attorney General, on March 11.
Eight days later, President Bush changed his mind and ordered the collection of bulk Internet metadata halted. Collection resumed in July, after the government convinced Judge Kollar Kotelly to sign off on a new legal justification for the program.
Three other surveillance programs — dealing with telephone metadata and the content of phone calls and Internet communications — were allowed to continue after March 2004. But under pressure from the Department of Justice, the White House began looking for new legal foundations for these programs. “DOJ and NSA needed to find a legal theory that would allow NSA to add and drop thousands of foreign targets for content collection. Beacuse the law was more restrictive for content than metadata, NSA had serious reservations about whether it would be possible to find a workable solution using a FISC order at that time.”
Finally, DoJ lawyers found a solution. The FISC grants orders based on “facilities,” which were traditionally phone numbers or e-mail addresses. But the DoJ convinced the FISC that a “facility” could also be a “gateway or cable head that foreign targets use for communications.” In other words, rather than seeking a court order for each individual target, the NSA sought permission to intercept the communications of thousands of people with a single FISA order.
The Inspector General says it took “18 months of concerted effort and coordination” to convince the FISC to sign onto this creative interpretation of the law with respect to foreign targets. The court rejected this interpretation of the law when the government was targeting Americans, forcing the government to begin seeking conventional FISA orders to intercept Americans’ international communications.
After more than a decade, opponents of Bush’s surveillance programs have still not had an opportunity to challenge them in court. But the sheer number of people who raised concerns, including company lawyers, Department of Justice lawyers, and the FISC itself, suggests the Bush-era spying programs were on shaky legal ground. Lawyers at the Department of Justice are not known for their devotion to civil liberties, yet several of them apparently believed that the White House had stepped over the line.
© The Washington Post Company
By Timothy B. Lee, Updated: June 27, 2013
A remarkable document released by The Guardian gives the public its first in-depth look at the legal process that justified the dragnet surveillance programs undertaken during President George W. Bush’s first term. And they make clear that lots of people involved in the process — government lawyers, judges, and the lawyers of private telecommunications companies — believed the Bush administration had stepped over the legal line.
Former President George W. Bush. (Chip Somodevilla — Getty Images)
The revelations come from a report written by the Office of the Inspector General at the National Security Agency. The document, marked “Top Secret” was leaked to The Guardian by Edward Snowden. It is dated March 24, 2009.
According to the document:
The NSA began targeting communications between the United States and Afghanistan just three days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. When Vice President Dick Cheney asked whether the NSA could be doing more, NSA director Michael Hayden responded that “nothing else could be done with existing NSA authorities.” The NSA found the judicial review process required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act too cumbersome for the broad-ranging surveillance the agency believed was necessary to keep track of terrorist activities.
But rather than asking Congress to amend FISA, President Bush took the law into his own hands on Oct. 4, 2001. He signed an “Authorization,” drafted by vice presidential counsel David Addington, purporting to give the NSA broad authority to intercept telephone and Internet communications if at least one party to the communication was located outside the United States.
The White House Office of Legal counsel wrote a legal opinion defending the legality of wiretapping based on Bush’s Authorization. The White House refused two requests by NSA lawyers to see this document, though Addington did “read a few paragraphs of the opinion” over the phone to NSA General Counsel Robert Deitz. The NSA’s inspector general stated that he found it “strange that NSA was told to execute a secret program that everyone knew presented legal questions, without being told the underpinning legal theory.”
The surveillance required the assistance of private-sector telecommunications companies. While some firms readily agreed to participate, others balked at the idea of violating their customers’ privacy without a court order. The report discusses the NSA’s discussions with seven firms labeled “Company A” through “Company G.” Companies A through D participated in the NSA program. “The Company E General Counsel ultimately decided not to support NSA.” Company F “did not participate because of corporate liability concerns.” The NSA dropped Company G from the program after it insisted on consulting outside counsel before agreeing to participate.
The report says that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was not even informed about this secret surveillance until Jan. 31, 2002, more than three months after the program began. After Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly was sworn in as the Chief Judge of the FISC in May 2002, she was briefed on the program and allowed to read a memo summarizing the White House’s legal justification, but she was not allowed to “retain it for study.”
In March 2004, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice concluded that one part of the NSA’s surveillance program “was prohibited by the terms of FISA and Title III.” Attorney General John Ashcroft and his deputies resisted White House pressure to sign off on the program. But rather than shut down that aspect of the program, the President had the White House Counsel sign an Authorization for the program, instead of the Attorney General, on March 11.
Eight days later, President Bush changed his mind and ordered the collection of bulk Internet metadata halted. Collection resumed in July, after the government convinced Judge Kollar Kotelly to sign off on a new legal justification for the program.
Three other surveillance programs — dealing with telephone metadata and the content of phone calls and Internet communications — were allowed to continue after March 2004. But under pressure from the Department of Justice, the White House began looking for new legal foundations for these programs. “DOJ and NSA needed to find a legal theory that would allow NSA to add and drop thousands of foreign targets for content collection. Beacuse the law was more restrictive for content than metadata, NSA had serious reservations about whether it would be possible to find a workable solution using a FISC order at that time.”
Finally, DoJ lawyers found a solution. The FISC grants orders based on “facilities,” which were traditionally phone numbers or e-mail addresses. But the DoJ convinced the FISC that a “facility” could also be a “gateway or cable head that foreign targets use for communications.” In other words, rather than seeking a court order for each individual target, the NSA sought permission to intercept the communications of thousands of people with a single FISA order.
The Inspector General says it took “18 months of concerted effort and coordination” to convince the FISC to sign onto this creative interpretation of the law with respect to foreign targets. The court rejected this interpretation of the law when the government was targeting Americans, forcing the government to begin seeking conventional FISA orders to intercept Americans’ international communications.
After more than a decade, opponents of Bush’s surveillance programs have still not had an opportunity to challenge them in court. But the sheer number of people who raised concerns, including company lawyers, Department of Justice lawyers, and the FISC itself, suggests the Bush-era spying programs were on shaky legal ground. Lawyers at the Department of Justice are not known for their devotion to civil liberties, yet several of them apparently believed that the White House had stepped over the line.
© The Washington Post Company
BotanyBoy
Fuck Your Safe Space
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Well that's irrefutable proof that it makes it fine for the OBUMMADOUCHE to do the same.....way to set standards DAN.
Hey everyone....dan says if Bush is an evil fuck that justifies Obama being one too....LOL
DAN FAIL!!!
Is that kinda like Obama not ending the wars after promising too is ok b/c bush started them?
HAHAHAHA
dan_c00000
Literotica Guru
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- Oct 20, 2006
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Obama announces end of Iraq war, troops to return home by year end
President Barack Obama speaks in the briefing room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Oct 21, 2011, address the status of U.S. forces in Iraq. AP Photo/Susan Walsh
Updated 2:14 p.m. ET
President Obama announced Friday that the United States will withdraw nearly all troops from Iraq by the end of the year, effectively bringing the long and polarizing war in Iraq to an end.
"After nearly 9 years, America's war in Iraq will be over," said Mr. Obama.
He said the last American troops will depart the country by January 1 "with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops."
"The transition in Afghanistan is moving forward, and our troops are finally coming home," he added, saying in the White House briefing room that U.S. troops "will definitely be home for the holidays."
The war in Iraq has meant the death of more than 4,400 U.S. troops and come at a cost of more than $700 billion. Asked in a briefing following Mr. Obama's remarks if it was worth it, Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, said, "history is going to have to judge."
Iraq: By the numbers
U.S. and Iraqi officials have spent months debating whether to honor a planned December 31 deadline for troop withdrawal, set in 2008, amid concerns that the full withdrawal of U.S. forces could put the country at risk. Many U.S. officials wanted to leave a few thousand military trainers in the country past the end of the year, but, as the Associated Press reported Sunday, "Iraqi leaders have adamantly refused to give U.S. troops immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts, and the Americans have refused to stay without it."
America has already withdrawn nearly 100,000 troops from Iraq already as part of the current draw-down; nearly 40,000 "non-combat" troops remain. Mr. Obama said Friday that "Iraqis have taken full responsibility for their country's security" and said that the relationship between the United States and Iraq going forward will be one of equals.
"It will be a normal relationship between sovereign nations, an equal partnership based on mutual interest and mutual respect," he said.
Mr. Obama discussed the planned announcement earlier in the day with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki over secure video conference. He said al-Maliki "spoke of the determination of the Iraqi people to forge their own future," and that the two leaders are "in full agreement about how to move forward."
Mr. Obama said he had invited al-Maliki to the White House in December and vowed that the United States and Iraq will embark on a "strong and enduring partnership."
"As I told Prime Minister Maliki, we will continue discussions on how we might help Iraq train and equip its forces, again, just as we offer training and assistance to countries around the world," said the president. "After all, there will be some difficult days ahead for Iraq and the United States will continue to have an interest in an Iraq that is stable, secure and self-reliant.
Mr. Obama had vowed to end the war in Iraq as a presidential candidate. He spoke out passionately against the war in 2002, though later said the United States had an "absolute obligation" to stay in the country as long as it took to achieve success.
Mr. Obama said the United States will be "moving forward from a position of strength" and that the troop departure "will be a time to reflect on all that we've been through in this war."
"I'll join the American people in paying tribute to the more than 1 million Americans who have served in Iraq," he said. "We'll honor our many wounded warriors and the nearly 4,500 American patriots and their Iraqi and coalition partners who gave their lives to this effort."
Iraq pullout comes as most say war going well
Mr. Obama cast the end of the Iraq war in the larger context of a smaller U.S. military presence around the world. "The tide of war is receding," he said, pointing to the start of a troop withdrawal in Afghanistan.
"When I took office, roughly 180,000 troops were deployed in both these wars. And by the end of this year that number will be cut in half," he said. "And make no mistake, they will continue to go down."
Kiss_me_gently
Really Experienced
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Hey dan welcome to ignore. Buffoon
BotanyBoy
Fuck Your Safe Space
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My old crew back in Afghanistan 2013....Currahee mother fuckers!!! \m/
US troops in Iraq...2013
You and Obama can run your fucking mouths all you want, we still have service members fighting and dying in those 2 shit holes they could have been home 5 years ago but Obummer lied like the sack of shit politician he is. He got the gravy train offer from the MIC and dragged ass b/c he sold out EXACTLY like bush did. Blood money is too yummy for the Obamanator....
So...until every single combat soldier/divisor/commander etc. is back in garrison you can STFU b/c you don't have fuckin' shit.....not a god damn thing.
And of all those excuses you made about the spying "BUT BUSH DID IT" STILL makes it any fucking better for Obama to do it.
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koalabear
~Armed and Fuzzy~
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My old crew back in Afghanistan 2013
US troops in Iraq...2013
You and Obama can run your fucking mouths all you want, we still have service members fighting and dying in those 2 shit holes. STFU.
And of all those excuses you made about the spying "BUT BUSH DID IT" STILL makes it any fucking better for Obama to do it.
Just as I thought, you are a domestic terrorist!!!!!
BotanyBoy
Fuck Your Safe Space
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Just as I thought, you are a domestic terrorist!!!!!
On the Official shit list before the ink on my DD214 was dry.
Busybody
We are ALL BUSYBODY!
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My old crew back in Afghanistan 2013..t.
I blame teh REPOZ
BotanyBoy
Fuck Your Safe Space
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No that's DUMOHZ bidnizz.....
phrodeau
Literotica Guru
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That guy has a camera. LOOK BUSY!!
phrodeau
Literotica Guru
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Even Fox News admits that the Afghan War is over. It must be true.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/08/15/it-could-be-uncle-sam-biggest-yard-sale/
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/08/15/it-could-be-uncle-sam-biggest-yard-sale/
Busybody
We are ALL BUSYBODY!
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WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON AT THE NSA? The NSA Won’t Say. “The proper response to the latest revelations is not panic but deep frustration and a demand for data that does more than get the NSA through a news cycle. It must be more forthcoming, or it will lose its mandate. And if the president wants to kill the program, he should say so; otherwise, he should get off the golf links and explain what is going on here.”
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