The Agency That Could Be Big Brother

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The Agency That Could Be Big Brother

By JAMES BAMFORD

Published: December 25, 2005

 

Washington

 

DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden

by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping

bug. Located in a " radio quiet " zone, the station's large parabolic

dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone

calls and e-mail messages an hour.

 

Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post

intercepts all international communications entering the eastern

United States. Another N.S.A. listening post, in Yakima,Wash.,

eavesdrops on the western half of the country.

 

A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the N.S.A.

has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The

controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly

ordered the N.S.A. to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless

eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to

call for his impeachment.

 

According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the

Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first

briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret

operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own

code word - which itself is secret.

 

Jokingly referred to as " No Such Agency, " the N.S.A. was created in

absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is

the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important,

providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and

other spy organizations.

 

But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in

which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells

hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has

developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts

of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at

home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties

and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally

created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed

to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho

Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on

intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned.

 

" That capability at any time could be turned around on the American

people, " he said in 1975, " and no American would have any privacy

left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone

conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place

to hide. "

 

He added that if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. " could enable

it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back. "

 

At the time, the agency had the ability to listen to only what people

said over the telephone or wrote in an occasional telegram; they had

no access to private letters. But today, with people expressing their

innermost thoughts in e-mail messages, exposing their medical and

financial records to the Internet, and chatting constantly on

cellphones, the agency virtually has the ability to get inside a

person's mind.

 

The N.S.A.'s original target had been the Communist bloc. The agency

wrapped the Soviet Union and its satellite nations in an electronic

cocoon. Anytime an aircraft, ship or military unit moved, the N.S.A.

would know. And from 22,300 miles in orbit, satellites with

super-thin, football-field-sized antennas eavesdropped on Soviet

communications and weapons signals.

 

Today, instead of eavesdropping on an enormous country that was always

chattering and never moved, the N.S.A. is trying to find small numbers

of individuals who operate in closed cells, seldom communicate

electronically (and when they do, use untraceable calling cards or

disposable cellphones) and are constantly traveling from country to

country.

 

During the cold war, the agency could depend on a constant flow of

American-born Russian linguists from the many universities around the

country with Soviet studies programs. Now the government is forced to

search ethnic communities to find people who can speak Dari, Urdu or

Lingala - and also pass a security clearance that frowns on people

with relatives in their, or their parents', former countries.

 

According to an interview last year with Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then

the N.S.A.'s director, intercepting calls during the war on terrorism

has become a much more complex endeavor. On Sept. 10, 2001, for

example, the N.S.A. intercepted two messages. The first warned, " The

match begins tomorrow, " and the second said, " Tomorrow is zero hour. "

But even though they came from suspected Al Qaeda locations in

Afghanistan, the messages were never translated until after the attack

on Sept. 11, and not distributed until Sept. 12.

 

What made the intercepts particularly difficult, General Hayden said,

was that they were not " targeted " but intercepted randomly from Afghan

pay phones.

 

This makes identification of the caller extremely difficult and slow.

" Know how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a

given day? Thousands, " General Hayden said.

 

Still, the N.S.A. doesn't have to go to the courts to use its

electronic monitoring to snare Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan. For

the agency to snoop domestically on American citizens suspected of

having terrorist ties, it first must to go to the Foreign Intelligence

Surveillance Court, or FISA, make a showing of probable cause that the

target is linked to a terrorist group, and obtain a warrant.

 

The court rarely turns the government down. Since it was established

in 1978, the court has granted about 19,000 warrants; it has only

rejected five. And even in those cases the government has the right to

appeal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which

in 27 years has only heard one case. And should the appeals court also

reject the warrant request, the government could then appeal

immediately to a closed session of the Supreme Court.

 

Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the N.S.A. normally eavesdropped on a

small number of American citizens or resident aliens, often a dozen or

less, while the F.B.I., whose low-tech wiretapping was far less

intrusive, requested most of the warrants from FISA.

 

Despite the low odds of having a request turned down, President Bush

established a secret program in which the N.S.A. would bypass the FISA

court and begin eavesdropping without warrant on Americans. This

decision seems to have been based on a new concept of monitoring by

the agency, a way, according to the administration, to effectively

handle all the data and new information.

 

At the time, the buzzword in national security circles was data

mining: digging deep into piles of information to come up with some

pattern or clue to what might happen next. Rather than monitoring a

dozen or so people for months at a time, as had been the practice, the

decision was made to begin secretly eavesdropping on hundreds, perhaps

thousands, of people for just a few days or a week at a time in order

to determine who posed potential threats.

 

Those deemed innocent would quickly be eliminated from the watch list,

while those thought suspicious would be submitted to the FISA court

for a warrant.

 

In essence, N.S.A. seemed to be on a classic fishing expedition,

precisely the type of abuse the FISA court was put in place to stop.At

a news conference, President Bush himself seemed to acknowledge this

new tactic. " FISA is for long-term monitoring, " he said. " There's a

difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring. "

 

This eavesdropping is not the Bush administration's only attempt to

expand the boundaries of what is legally permissible.

 

In 2002, it was revealed that the Pentagon had launched Total

Information Awareness, a data mining program led by John Poindexter, a

retired rear admiral who had served as national security adviser under

Ronald Reagan and helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and

illegally divert the proceeds to rebels in Nicaragua.

 

Total Information Awareness, known as T.I.A., was intended to search

through vast data bases, promising to " increase the information

coverage by an order-of-magnitude. " According to a 2002 article in The

New York Times, the program " would permit intelligence analysts and

law enforcement officials to mount a vast dragnet through electronic

transaction data ranging from credit card information to veterinary

records, in the United States and internationally, to hunt for

terrorists. " After press reports, the Pentagon shut it down, and Mr.

Poindexter eventually left the government.

 

But according to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, the Bush

administration and the Pentagon continued to rely heavily on

data-mining techniques. " Our survey of 128 federal departments and

agencies on their use of data mining, " the report said, " shows that 52

agencies are using or are planning to use data mining. These

departments and agencies reported 199 data-mining efforts, of which 68

are planned and 131 are operational. " Of these uses, the report

continued, " the Department of Defense reported the largest number of

efforts. "

 

The administration says it needs this technology to effectively combat

terrorism. But the effect on privacy has worried a number of politicians.

 

After he was briefed on President Bush's secret operation in 2003,

Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate

Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a letter to Vice President Dick

Cheney.

 

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

wrote, " John Poindexter's T.I.A. project sprung to mind, exacerbating

my concern regarding the direction the administration is moving with

regard to security, technology, and surveillance. "

 

Senator Rockefeller sounds a lot like Senator Frank Church.

 

" I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge, " Senator

Church said. " I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total

in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies

that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper

supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss

from which there is no return. "

 

James Bamford is the author of " Puzzle Palace " and " Body of Secrets:

Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. "