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You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / Even More on the NSA

Even More on the NSA

by John Cole|  December 25, 20052:35 pm| 24 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics, Politics, Science & Technology, War on Terror aka GSAVE®

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Big piece in the NY Times today on the NSA and their activities:

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…

Increasingly, it is becoming clear to me that I was oddly naive about the activities of the NSA. Or maybe I was excessively and unrealistically paranoid. I assumed the NSA was monitoring all sorts of communications they apparently (at least according to commenters here and the press) were not. In other words, I was not ‘shocked’ by the recent allegations of snooping because I thought that it had been going on for years. Many of you state otherwise, and some of you are lawyers and have some experience in the area, so maybe these new revelations of the NSA’s activities the past few year are just that- shocking revelations. Again, as I have before, I will just have to plead ignorance or paranoia, because I thought this was already going on.

At any rate, read the entire NY Times piece, as it is interesting and well-written.

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Reader Interactions

24Comments

  1. 1.

    Mike S

    December 25, 2005 at 2:53 pm

    I’m leaving all of this alone for today. Today is better spent thinking about good things, good family and good basketball. I’ll put my political hat back on tomorrow.

  2. 2.

    Emma Zahn

    December 25, 2005 at 3:06 pm

    From the article on TIA, After press reports, the Pentagon shut it down, and Mr. Poindexter eventually left the government.

    Does anyone believe this?

  3. 3.

    Paddy O'Shea

    December 25, 2005 at 3:56 pm

    How can you tell that there are storm clouds on the horizon of our nation’s capital?

    The ass-covering has begun.

    Wash Post: Powell Backs Eavesdropping To Stop Terror

    1) Colin is Ok with it, but ..
    2) Bush probably should have obtained warrants first, and ..
    3) Colin didn’t know anything about it.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/25/AR2005122500280.html

  4. 4.

    Justin

    December 25, 2005 at 3:57 pm

    “maybe these new revelations of the NSA’s activities the past few year are just that- shocking revelations.”

    You mean, these new revelations about *what Bush authorized the NSA to do.* And reauthorized, 30 times, without asking Congress to change the law like an honest President would. It’s important to remember that career intelligence officers have been coming out of the woodwork to say that this is not stuff that they want to be doing; it’s their country too.

  5. 5.

    ppGaz

    December 25, 2005 at 4:56 pm

    Eventually, when all of the talking heads have talked themselves out on this, it will be seen not as a question of legality or even Constitutionality. It will be seen as a question of policy. That is the correct way to assess it, and of course, as a matter of policy, the behavior described so far is further erosion of liberty in exchange for something of relatively little long-term value, at the hands of arrogant crapheads. As John would say, not exactly news, but nevertheless, damnable and destructive.

  6. 6.

    demimondian

    December 25, 2005 at 5:07 pm

    Eventually, when all of the talking heads have talked themselves out on this, it will be seen not as a question of legality or even Constitutionality.

    Not really, ppG. To the extent that we need to decide what to do about it, it’s not just a matter of policy, but also a matter of law.

    To paraphrase an old Taoist quatrain:

    If the policy is bad and legal, then fix the policy.
    If the policy is good but illegal, then change the law.

    If the policy is good and legal, then praise the government.
    If the policy is bad and illegal, then throw the bums out.

    I’m thinking we’re in case I. Darrell thinks we’re in case III.

  7. 7.

    ppGaz

    December 25, 2005 at 5:24 pm

    Case I is the basis for my post.

    It’s “legal” because the law is murky and the interpretation of it is largely suspect. But it’s not unambiguously illegal.

    The cowards who make law don’t have the stones to address the real issues. Presidents are all too happy to walk all over everything when they feel like it.

    I for one do not agree that strict separation of powers and strong oversight need to be traded away for a little safety. I didn’t think so during the Cold War and I sure as hell don’t think so now.

  8. 8.

    Justin

    December 25, 2005 at 5:46 pm

    I’m convinced that we’re in “case IV.” This is only the latest of attempted power grabs by this administration (some successful, some not). Think of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, where they tried to argue that separation of powers prevented the courts from hearing habeas petitions by anyone that the executive branch felt the need to detain. The potential problems with establishing standing with regard to the clearly illegal NSA program mean that this will have to play out in the legislative branch, if at all.

    That means that Congress has to set the President straight about just what he can and cannot do. I have been thinking about this, and I wonder if history will record this power grab by Bush as the sort of defining test of this Congress; will they draw the line in the sand before Bush’s feet? And if he crosses it, will they impeach him? Because the notion of a President who claims and exercises the power to ignore any statute or limitation on his authority in general cannot stand. Pat Buchanan dared Democrats to recapture the House and do just this.

    I’ll have to see how these “hearings” we’ve been hearing about from Specter et. al. play out, but my guess is that the core GOP leadership will quash anything substantive, which leaves really only one option…

    Anyways if that sounded a little melodramatic then pardon me; it’s just that I’m beginning to wonder if my conservative friends who always talked about defending the Constitution have gone bonkers. I urge people not to tolerate this…as Ben Franklin would say, those who would give up their liberty for a little security deserve neither.

  9. 9.

    ppGaz

    December 25, 2005 at 5:56 pm

    I’m beginning to wonder if my conservative friends who always talked about defending the Constitution have gone bonkers

    .

    Well, some of them really cared about the Constitution. The Goldwater conservatives, let’s say. JC might be one of these. He said he was.

    Anyway, most people who call themselves “conservatives” are actually just contrarian, anti-progressive, anti-liberal, and have no particular ideological bent that can stand up to any intellectual scrutiny. All the emotional bunkum — aka “values” politics — is just manipulation, and has no intellectual basis at all.

    So have they “gone bonkers?” Only if you believe that most of them were sincere and had integrity in the first place.

  10. 10.

    Justin

    December 25, 2005 at 6:43 pm

    I guess that’s the big question mark, and what happens in Congress in the next 10 months will give us an answer as to whether they were sincere.

  11. 11.

    glenn

    December 25, 2005 at 7:32 pm

    Nothing will come of the spying scandal just as nothing has come of all the other multitude of scandals this corrupt ruthless evil administration has gotten away with these past 5 sad years. You can already see the MSM has no intention of following this story for more then a few days. If this was Democratic president doing 1/10 of the shit these ass klowns have gotten away with he would have been impeached years ago. Bu$h is our KIng now all that’s missing is the title and the crown. That’s next.

  12. 12.

    dorkafork

    December 25, 2005 at 10:10 pm

    If it makes you feel better, John, I thought the same thing with the Echelon reporting. Stories like “UK: GCHQ Spies on Charities and Companies – Fearful Whistleblowers Tell of Massive Routine Abuse,” Observer (London), June 18, 1992. Or the 60 Minutes story that included a story about Thatcher getting info on two cabinet ministers. There’s a huge list of (mostly broken) links here with hair-raising titles about Echelon. In all fairness, the titles had more to do with the Europeans being unhappy with being a target of the system. And I couldn’t find any stories with American agents describing abuse of the system. (The 60 Minutes piece involved a Canadian agent.) I just kind of assumed that if the Canadians and UK did that sort of thing, the US probably did, too.

  13. 13.

    ATS

    December 26, 2005 at 11:46 am

    I can well imagine what Bob Taft or Barry Goldwater would have said about domestic spying. I can guess what they would have thought about doing so in direct defiance of a criminal statute that requires getting a readily available warrant.
    But for the life of me I cannot even imagine their reaction to a Republican Congress making excuses for it.
    Any conservative who pretends to excuse this should buy a brown shirt and abandon the pretext.

  14. 14.

    Darrell

    December 26, 2005 at 11:47 am

    I had dinner with a group of friends Friday night including a buddy who is ex-NSA who left in the mid-90’s. He said the same thing DougJ mentioned the other day the NSA drills it into their heads that they shouldn’t wiretap US civilians.. had to memorize this during training and recite it before every mission. However, unlike DougJ’s contacts, this guy was unconcerned by these new reports.. He was trained to monitor N. Korean activities and movements using military frequencies so he never encountered a situation where a ‘target’ made or received calls from Americans. He did says that if they had, he would have to report it to someone of higher rank who would ‘handle’ it, and he didn’t know the details of what ‘handling it’ would entail.

    But he said it would be almost certain that such communications between a target and US citizens would be recorded (or transcribed) and saved in a database with or without warrant. He pointed out that the NSA almost never has ‘probable cause’ as their mission to search for wrongdoing.

    What’s more, he gave a simplistic example of how NSA operates – they target individuals or areas, Kandahar for example. If they intercepted phone calls from Americans in Phoenix that seemed innocent, that information would need to be saved. Why? What if the conversation were innocent, but they used a strange Farsi word which mean, say pineapple or something.

    Two months later, analysts note a pattern in Yemen back in the 90’s where this Farsi word for pineapple was increasingly used in communications just before the USS Cole attack. Now, with database queries, they are able to search what was a seemingly innocent call to gather more info on a potential attack in the US.. The value of NSA intel is largely in the databases searches of communications which could not be possibly justified as collected under ‘probable cause’

    I have yet to hear, and my buddy could not remember, what happens if there is a foreign target which happens to receive or send communications to US citizens? Has anyone persuasively answered this important question? The President can monitor foreign enemies without warrant

  15. 15.

    chef

    December 26, 2005 at 11:52 am

    But there were American stories about Echelon abuses. Something in connection with AIRBUS contracts. The US uncovered European bribery initiatives and passed it on to Boeing. That use of a Bad Aibling intercept was in direct contradiction to the statutory mandate of the NSA.

    Just the beginning, it seems.

  16. 16.

    Darrell

    December 26, 2005 at 12:01 pm

    I should have clarified better in my previous post, if the NSA was targetting Kandahar, and they received or sent phone calls or other communcation between Kandahar and phone numbers in Phoenix. The NSA does not have the right to target US citizens, but if a foreign enemy is the target, an enemy who happens to send or receive communications to Americans, it seems reasonable that the NSA should be able to use that data without warrant as they have the right to monitor foreign enemies without warrant

  17. 17.

    Darrell

    December 26, 2005 at 12:45 pm

    I assumed the NSA was monitoring all sorts of communications they apparently (at least according to commenters here and the press) were not.

    To conclude the NSA was “apparently” not monitoring all sorts of communications requires one to believe that they were using all sorts of high-tech surveillance to monitor foreign enemies, but never intercepted or read any communications between these foreign enemies and US citizens. That’s what you would have to believe in order to assert that the NSA was not monitoring communications involving US citizens (or ‘persons’)

  18. 18.

    ppGaz

    December 26, 2005 at 12:57 pm

    This thread is now closed. Darrell posts are at the 50% level since about 8am this morning. No further value can come from this exchange.

    Another perfectly good thread, lost to Darrell and his spam-o-rama.

  19. 19.

    demimondian

    December 26, 2005 at 2:20 pm

    To conclude the NSA was “apparently” not monitoring all sorts of communications requires one to believe that they were using all sorts of high-tech surveillance to monitor foreign enemies, but never intercepted or read any communications between these foreign enemies and US citizens. That’s what you would have to believe in order to assert that the NSA was not monitoring communications involving US citizens (or ‘persons’)

    Not exactly. The NSA maintains “minimization procedures” for all communications involving US persons. (As defined by FISA, a US person is any citizen, or any alien legally resident in the United States.)

    IIRC — and it’s been a while — the minimization procedure used to kick in after 90 days, at which point most, but not necessarily all, of all suspect communications would be discarded and purged. The whole 2002 FISA review, in fact, was triggered over a debate about whether the minimization procedures were sufficient, and over whether the FISC could dictate additional ones to the president.

    In short, the data would be sucked in and indexed, but if it didn’t turn out to be hot enough, would be thrown away. The NSA was trying to walk a narrow line between monitoring domestic threats with an international basis and not monitoring US persons.

  20. 20.

    Darrell

    December 26, 2005 at 4:36 pm

    These ‘minimization procedures’ tossing valuable intel doesn’t pass the smell test. Do you have more evidence? Here is a case in which a US citizen Al Queda affiliate in Kenya was targeted and searched without warrant in the 1990’s and the court upheld the action because he was not the ‘target’ of the surveillance. Not just electronic surveillance, but a search of his house was upheld. A lot of interestng language from the court ruling:

    All of the cases which have established the existence of a foreign intelligence exception to the warrant requirement (and which are relied upon by the Government) arose in the context of electronic
    surveillance.

    ..The Government’s assertion that [redacted ] actions were primarily for the purpose of foreign intelligence
    collection is reinforced by the fact that foreign intelligence collection against Bin Laden and al Qaeda
    “continues today.”

  21. 21.

    Darrell

    December 26, 2005 at 4:45 pm

    Keeping in mind El-Hage was a US citizen, the court also wrote

    1. The President’s Power Over Foreign Affairs

    In all of the cases finding an exception to the warrant requirement for foreign intelligencecollection, a determinative basis for the decision was the constitutional grant to the Executive Branch of power over foreign affairs. On numerous occasions, the Supreme Court has addressed the constitutional competence of the President in the field of foreign affairs. .

    2. The Costs of Imposing a Warrant Requirement

    It is generally the case that imposition of a warrant requirement better safeguards the Fourth
    Amendment rights of citizens in the Defendant’s position. But several cases direct that when the imposition of a warrant requirement proves to be a disproportionate and perhaps even disabling burden on the Executive, a warrant should not be required.

    . .

  22. 22.

    demimondian

    December 26, 2005 at 6:00 pm

    Sorry, Darrell, although your case is real, it isn’t relevant; remember the ninety-day part of the minimization requirements.

  23. 23.

    Darrell

    December 26, 2005 at 6:31 pm

    Sorry, Darrell, although your case is real, it isn’t relevant

    Specifically how is it NOT relevant that a federal court ruled that a US citizen, not the initial target of surveillance of foreign enemies, was permitted to be wiretapped and have his house searched WITHOUT warrant? That is entirely relevant.

    Regarding the remembering th ninety-day part, I asked you for citation on that as it makes no sense that the govt would purge possible useful data like that after 90 days

  24. 24.

    ats

    December 27, 2005 at 1:51 pm

    Before all the bloggers in WHIG corner get overly keen on putting the thumbscrews on the NYT journalists they should reflect on what else would likely be revealed and widely publicized along the way, i.e., why NSA career people were mad enough to leak this stuff.

    That, in turn, would shed light on how this White House has pressured and manipulated the intel community. This is all about how General Hayden got his new star, and no one at 1600 is eager to let that story out.

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