U.S. Spying Is Much Wider, Some Suspect

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Tue, 27 Dec 2005 01:52:28 -0500

U.S. Spying Is Much Wider, Some Suspect

 

 

 

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-spy25dec25,0,1214433.story

 

 

December 25, 2005

 

 

THE NATION

U.S. Spying Is Much Wider, Some Suspect

By Josh Meyer and Joseph Menn, Times Staff Writers

 

WASHINGTON — President Bush has acknowledged that several hundred

targeted Americans were wiretapped without warrants under the National

Security Agency's domestic spying program, and now some U.S. officials

and outside experts say they suspect that the government is engaged in

a far broader U.S. surveillance operation.

 

Although these experts have no specific evidence, they say that the

NSA has a vast array of satellites and other high-tech tools that it

could be using to eavesdrop on a much larger cross-section of people

in the United States without permission from a court.

 

The suspicion is quietly gaining currency among current and former

U.S. intelligence officials and among outside experts familiar with

how the NSA operates.

 

The NSA conducts such " wholesale " surveillance continuously almost

everywhere else in the world. It does so by using a sprawling network

of land-based satellite transponder stations and friendly foreign

intelligence agencies and telecommunication companies to collect

millions of phone calls, e-mails and other communications.

 

Powerful NSA supercomputers search this " sigint " — short for signals

intelligence — for words that might suggest terrorist plots, such as

" bomb, " then pass the information to intelligence and law enforcement

agencies.

 

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the NSA and now the No. 2 U.S.

intelligence official, has said the NSA does not use the same

technologies to purposely spy on Americans. The agency is prohibited

from doing so by federal laws enacted after the domestic spying

scandals of the 1970s.

 

Rare exceptions must be approved by a special court overseeing the

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The top-secret tribunal

considers requests for warrants when the NSA or FBI believes such

surveillance is needed to protect national security.

 

This month it was disclosed that the Bush administration has

circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor

hundreds of Americans since the Sept. 11 attacks without any warrants.

Bush and his inner circle said the practice is limited to occasions

when an individual in the U.S. is communicating with someone overseas

who has a known link to Al Qaeda, other terrorist groups or their

supporters.

 

But some officials and other experts believe the top-secret program

may be doing more than that.

 

" It's really obvious to me that it's a look-at-everything type

program, " said cryptography expert Bruce Schneier, who has written

several books about security.

 

Schneier and others suspect that the NSA may be turning its satellites

toward the United States and gathering vast streams of raw data from

many more people than disclosed — potentially including all e-mails

and phone calls from the United States to certain other countries.

 

Companies Cooperate

 

These experts were chiefly talking about satellite surveillance, but

the NSA can use other means to eavesdrop. The New York Times reported

Saturday that the NSA has collected large volumes of telephone and

Internet communications since the Sept. 11 attacks by " tapping

directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main

arteries. "

 

Leading telecommunication companies have been saving information on

calling patterns and passing it along to the government, the newspaper

said. The companies have also given the NSA access to electronic

switches that connect U.S. and overseas communications networks, a

" significant expansion " of NSA capabilities, it said.

 

Phone companies and others have cooperated with U.S. agencies

including the NSA for years. In the early 1990s, AT & T agreed to use an

NSA-designed chip to ensure that law enforcement had access to phone

calls.

 

And AT & T has a database code-named Daytona that keeps track of phone

numbers on both ends of calls as well as the duration of all land-line

calls, according to a business executive who has been briefed on the

system.

 

" This started as a way for phone companies to dig out fraud, " the

executive said Saturday. After Sept. 11, intelligence agencies began

to view it as a potential investigative tool, and the NSA has had a

direct hookup into the database, he said.

 

After such massive volumes of information are collected, they are

searched for suspicious language. The administration could thus argue

that only hundreds of people were monitored because those

conversations were the ones that were flagged because they contained

suspicious words, Schneier said.

 

" If a computer looks at all e-mail and says 'bing' once, is that

monitoring one person or millions? " Schneier asked. " The Bush numbers

are depending on that subterfuge. "

 

One former senior Pentagon official who has overseen such " data

mining " said he also believed the NSA was probably conducting such

wholesale surveillance.

 

" It's a reasonable hypothesis, " the official said, adding that he

believed it was necessary against savvy terrorists who would otherwise

remain undetected.

 

One former NSA signals-intelligence analyst, Russell D. Tice, said the

agency has long had such ability.

 

" I'm not allowed to say one way or another what the NSA is or is not

doing. But the technology exists, " said Tice, who left the NSA this year.

 

" Say Aunt Molly in Oklahoma calls her niece at an Army base in Germany

and says, 'Isn't it horrible about those terrorists and Sept. 11?' "

Tice said: That conversation would not only be captured by NSA

satellites listening in on Germany — which is legal — but flagged and

listened to by NSA analysts and possibly transcribed for further

investigation.

 

" All you would have to do is move the vacuum cleaner a little to the

left and begin sucking up the other end of that conversation, " Tice

said. " You move it a little more and you could be picking up

everything people are saying from California to New York. "

 

The White House, Justice Department and NSA have refused to discuss

the ongoing NSA program except to say that it conforms to U.S. law.

The president has cited the powers given to him by Congress after

Sept. 11 as well as his constitutional powers as commander in chief.

 

In interviews, current and former intelligence officials said

communications technology was so advanced that it would probably be

next to impossible for the NSA to filter out all of the U.S.-based

electronic communications even if it wanted to when casting a wide net

for terrorists.

 

Privacy Issues

 

Some administration critics in Congress have begun speculating that

the administration is specifically directing the NSA to conduct such

surveillance on people in the U.S.

 

Top-ranking senators from both parties are preparing questions for

administration officials at upcoming hearings on the controversy. Some

questions aim to pin down the administration on the issue of wholesale

versus individual surveillance, according to congressional staffers.

 

" Based on how much their story keeps changing, I think there's more to

the story, " said Susan McCue, chief of staff to Senate Minority Leader

Harry Reid (D-Nev.). " A lot of people on Capitol Hill think that. "

 

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court members have also demanded an

explanation, saying they are concerned that warrantless surveillance

is producing illegally gathered evidence that is then used to seek

warrants. One member resigned, reportedly because of the domestic

spying program.

 

For some, the program recalls John M. Poindexter's ill-fated Total

Information Awareness program, which he was developing for the

Pentagon after the Sept. 11 attacks to use electronic transactions

performed by millions of people daily to hunt for patterns and flag

suspicious activity.

 

After being briefed on the domestic spying program in summer 2003,

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) wrote to Vice President Dick

Cheney: " As I reflected on the meeting today, and the future we face,

John Poindexter's TIA project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern

regarding the direction the administration is moving with regard to

security, technology and surveillance. "

 

Total Information Awareness was essentially killed by Congress in

February 2003 over privacy concerns. But parts of it were quietly

moved elsewhere and continue to receive classified funding, according

to Poindexter.

 

In the business world, where customer information and other records

are used to look for unexpected patterns and trends in people's buying

habits, data mining is not particularly controversial.

 

But in the hands of a powerful government, critics say, data mining

raises serious concern about privacy and civil liberties, and the Bush

administration has used the practice aggressively.

 

After Sept. 11, the FBI created a data-mining program called Carnivore

but shelved it after critics said it was too intrusive. A Pentagon

program, Able Danger, created controversy with its pre-Sept. 11

attempts to uncover terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. Recently, a

Pentagon program aimed at protecting U.S.-based military installations

has come under fire for gathering information on protest groups.

 

Defending Data Mining

 

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was not designed to

accommodate data-mining projects, and some experts and knowledgeable

former U.S. officials suspect that that is why the administration is

circumventing it.

 

Because data mining entails tracing potentially millions of innocent

links to find a few suspicious ones, authorities would immediately

encounter problems establishing probable cause to proceed. Then, the

experts say, authorities would have to obtain warrants under the

surveillance act for vast numbers of phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

 

John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer appointed by Bush who was

centrally involved in crafting the administration's legal strategy in

the war on terrorism, declined to comment on the NSA program. But in

2003 congressional testimony, Yoo seemed to support such broad

surveillance when he said: " It appears clear that the 4th Amendment's

warrant requirement does not apply to surveillance and searches

undertaken to protect the national security from external threats. "

 

Yoo also said that the 4th Amendment protects against " unreasonable "

searches and seizures, not all of them.

 

On Friday, Yoo said he still holds that position: " I believe that the

4th Amendment itself allows the government to conduct warrantless

searches that are 'reasonable.' "

 

The NSA's wholesale collection of signals intelligence overseas has

given the Bush administration some of its biggest successes in the war

on terrorism.

 

U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials confirmed to the Los

Angeles Times that NSA intercepts were instrumental in capturing such

high-value Al Qaeda chieftains as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi

Binalshibh, who had both boasted shortly before their capture in 2003

of being masterminds of the Sept. 11 attacks. NSA intercepts also

placed Osama bin Laden at the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan.