The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings today heard testimony from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on the legality of the domestic surveillance by the NSA. Republicans joined Democrats in raising questions about whether President Bush went too far with the National Security Agency’s monitoring operations.
“The president does not have a blank check,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa. He wants the administration to ask the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review the program.
The committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, said bluntly that the secret surveillance program is not authorized by a 1978 law called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which he called the “exclusive source of authority for wiretapping for intelligence purposes.” “Wiretapping that is not authorized under that statute is a federal crime,” he said. “That is what the law says, and that is what the law means.”
MCI, Sprint and AT&T grant access to their systems without warrants or court orders, and provide call-routing information that helps physically locate the callers, USA Today reported.
Last month, the New York Times reported that the NSA is now involved in domestic spying.
“What is new is that the NSA has for the past three years had the authority to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States without a warrant. “It is that expansion of authority — not the need for a robust anti-terror intelligence operation — that prompted debate within the government, and that is the subject of the article.”
Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the National Security Agency, is now a whistleblower the agency would like to keep quiet.
Tice says the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use.
According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect’s phone number to hundreds or even thousands more. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.
“That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum,” Tice said.
The NewsHour has more on the controversy:
JIM LEHRER: Is the president willing to work with Congress to settle some of the legal disputes about the NSA surveillance program?
VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: We believe, Jim, that we have all the legal authority we need. He indicated the other day he’s willing to listen to ideas from the Congress, and certainly they have the right and the responsibility to suggest whatever they want to suggest.
[I thought that it was the JOB of the NSA to monitor all telecommunications traffic going outside the United States. Apparently I was mistaken. The hearings this week seemed to indicate otherwise].
The Baltimore Sun says NSA spent $1.2 Billion on their Trailblazer datamining initiative, similar to the Total Information Awareness program, with little to show for it. Newsweek adds:
Today, very quietly, the core of TIA [Total Information Awareness] survives with a new codename of Topsail (minus the futures market), two officials privy to the intelligence tell NEWSWEEK.
It is in programs like these that real data mining is going on and—considering the furor over TIA—with fewer intrusions on civil liberties than occur under the NSA surveillance program.
“It’s the best thing to come out of American intelligence in decades,” says John Arquilla, an intelligence expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “It is truly Poindexter’s brainchild. “On Sept. 10, 2001″, wrote former NSA senior director Philip Bobbitt, in The New York Times, “the NSA intercepted two messages: ‘The match begins tomorrow’ and ‘Tomorrow is zero hour.’ They were picked up from random monitoring of pay phones in areas of Afghanistan where Al Qaeda was active. No one knew what to make of them, and in any case they were not translated or disseminated until Sept. 12″. But “had we at the time cross-referenced credit card accounts, frequent-flyer programs and a cellphone number shared by those two men, data mining might easily have picked up on the 17 other men linked to them and flying on the same day at the same time on four flights,” Bobbitt wrote.
Today the NSA seems hardly more capable of piecing together the next “tomorrow is zero hour” intercept.
The National Visualization Analytics Center in Richland, Washington, ties into the national grid with parallel supercomputers, reports the Christian Science Monitor. A Smart Surveillance system can identify people using public webcams.It’s vital work, say supporters. Some fear it’s a slippery slope to Big Brother, without checks and balances. How datamining will be applied is the question. At least the United States has open hearings (and a free press).
Perhaps there’s an easy way to check on the legality of the NSA program — tour through international fiber termination facilities. NSA surveillence gear would be installed there.
Maybe representatives from SAIC, Congress and the NSA could check out the actual gear being used and deduce its purpose through public documents. Pacific Wave in Seattle’s Westin Building, for example, is the spot where international networks on the West Coast interconnect.
Or maybe I’m just being naive.
DARPA has literally thousands of cutting edge programs that help spur U.S. leadership in technology. Would SAIC’s Trailblazer program eventually data mine everything if left unchecked? Will a billion dollar research program be abandoned for a new, new thing? Congress is right to press for answers.
DailyWireless wrote about the Office of Information Awareness back in July of 2002, when it was a more “open” program and before the Washington Post raised questions about it. Senator Wyden (D-Ore) eliminated funding for the TIA program — which then resurfaced as The Matrix, a national datamining program for domestic police agencies. That program floundered when it was found to be selling private information on individuals to companies (like banks) for a profit.
ABC News, The Baltimore Sun, C/Net, NPR, USA Today, The Washington Post, Google News and Yahoo Full Coverage have the latest news. NPR carried the hearings live.
Related DailyWireless articles include; NSA’s Political Pickle, Tracking the NRO, Big Science Projects, Muni Fiber for Portland?, iGrid 2005, The Global Grid.
[...] Dr. Alexis Livanos, President of Northrop Grumman Space Technology, assured the Committee that his company is making changes to help get the program back on track. “We are working diligently to put NPOESS on solid footing and have made organizational changes to further improve the performance of our instrument subcontractors,” he said. [...]
Left by dailywireless.org » Indian Space Capsule on January 12th, 2007