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The Agency That Could Be Big Brother
By JAMES BAMFORD
12/25/05 "New
York Times" --- -- 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."
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
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