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NSA Gave Other U.S. Agencies Information From
Surveillance
Fruit of Eavesdropping Was Processed and Cross-Checked With
Databases
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
01/01/06 "Washington
Post" -- -- Information captured by the
National Security Agency's secret eavesdropping on communications
between the United States and overseas has been passed on to other
government agencies, which cross-check the information with tips and
information collected in other databases, current and former
administration officials said.
The NSA has turned such information over to the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA) and to other government entities, said three current
and former senior administration officials, although it could not be
determined which agencies received what types of information.
Information from intercepts -- which typically includes records of
telephone or e-mail communications -- would be made available by
request to agencies that are allowed to have it, including the FBI,
DIA, CIA and Department of Homeland Security, one former official
said.
At least one of those organizations, the DIA, has used NSA
information as the basis for carrying out surveillance of people in
the country suspected of posing a threat, according to two sources.
A DIA spokesman said the agency does not conduct such domestic
surveillance but would not comment further. Spokesmen for the FBI,
the CIA and the director of national intelligence, John D.
Negroponte, declined to comment on the use of NSA data.
Since the revelation last month that President Bush had authorized
the NSA to intercept communications inside the United States, public
concern has focused primarily on the legality of the NSA
eavesdropping. Less attention has been paid to, and little is known
about, how the NSA's information may have been used by other
government agencies to investigate American citizens or to
cross-check with other databases. In the 1960s and 1970s, the
military used NSA intercepts to maintain files on U.S. peace
activists, revelations of which prompted Congress to restrict the
NSA from intercepting communications of Americans.
Today's NSA intercepts yield two broad categories of information,
said a former administration official familiar with the program:
"content," which would include transcripts of a phone call or
e-mail, and "non-content," which would be records showing, for
example, who in the United States was called by, or was calling, a
number in another country thought to have a connection to a
terrorist group. At the same time, NSA tries to limit identifying
the names of Americans involved.
"NSA can make either type of information available to other
[intelligence] agencies where relevant, but with appropriate masking
of its origin," meaning that the source of the information and
method of getting it would be concealed, the former official said.
Agencies that get the information can use it to conduct "data
mining," or looking for patterns or matches with other databases
that they maintain, which may or may not be specifically geared
toward detecting terrorism threats, he said. "They are seeking to
separate the known from the unknown, relationships or associations,"
he added.
The NSA would sometimes monitor telephones, e-mails or fax
communications in cases where individuals in the United States --
and sometimes people they contacted -- were linked to an alleged
foreign terrorist group, officials have said. The NSA, officials
said, limited its decisions to follow-up with more electronic
surveillance on an individual to those cases where there was some
apparent link to terrorist sources.
But other agencies, one former official said, have used phone
numbers or other records obtained from NSA in combination with
wide-ranging databases to look for links and associations. "What
data sets are included is a policy decision [made by individual
agencies] when they involve other than terrorist links," he said.
DIA personnel stationed inside the United States went further on
occasion, conducting physical surveillance of people or vehicles
identified as a result of NSA intercepts, said two sources familiar
with the operations, although the DIA said it does not conduct such
activities.
The military personnel -- some of whose findings were reported to
the Northern Command in Colorado -- were employed as part of the
Pentagon's growing post-Sept. 11, 2001, domestic intelligence
activity based on the need to protect Defense Department facilities
and personnel from terrorist attacks, the sources said.
Northcom was set up in October 2002 to conduct operations to deter,
prevent and defeat terrorist threats in the United States and its
territories. The command runs two fusion centers that receive and
analyze intelligence gathered by other government agencies.
Those Northcom centers conduct data mining, where information
received from the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, state and local police, and
the Pentagon's Talon system are cross-checked to see if patterns
develop that could indicate terrorist activities.
Talon is a system that civilian and military personnel use to report
suspicious activities around military installations. Information
from these reports is fed into a database known as the Joint
Protection Enterprise Network, which is managed, as is the Talon
system, by the Counterintelligence Field Activity, the newest
Defense Department intelligence agency to focus primarily on
counterterrorism. The database is shared with intelligence and law
enforcement agencies and was found last month to have contained
information about peace activists and others protesting the Iraq war
that appeared to have no bearing on terrorism.
Military officials acknowledged that such information should have
been purged after 90 days and that the Talon system was being
reviewed.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, deputy director for national intelligence
and former head of NSA, told reporters last month that the
interception of communications to the United States allegedly
connected to terrorists was, in almost every case, of short
duration. He also said that when the NSA creates intelligence
reports based on information it collects, it minimizes the number of
Americans whose identities are disclosed, doing so only when
necessary.
"The same minimalizationist standards apply across the board,
including for this program," he said of the domestic eavesdropping
effort. "To make this very clear -- U.S. identities are minimized in
all of NSA's activities, unless, of course, the U.S. identity is
essential to understand the inherent intelligence value of the
intelligence report." Hayden did not address the question of how
long government agencies would archive or handle information from
the NSA.
Today's controversy over the domestic NSA intercepts echoes events
of more than three decades ago. Beginning in the late 1960s, the NSA
was asked initially by the Johnson White House and later by the
Army, the Secret Service, and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs to intercept messages to or from the United States. Members of
Congress were not informed of the program, code-named Minaret in one
phase.
The initial purpose was to "help determine the existence of foreign
influence" on "civil disturbances occurring throughout the nation,"
threats to the president and other issues, Gen. Lew Allen Jr., then
director of NSA, told a Select Senate Committee headed by then-Sen.
Frank Church (D-Idaho) in 1975.
Allen, in comments similar to recent Bush administration statements,
said collecting communications involving American citizens was
approved legally, by two attorneys general. He also said that the
Minaret intercepts discovered "a major foreign terrorist act planned
in a large city" and prevented "an assassination attempt on a
prominent U.S. figure abroad."
Overall, Allen said that 1,200 Americans citizens' calls were
intercepted over six years, and that about 1,900 reports were issued
in three areas of terrorism. As the Church hearings later showed,
the Army expanded the NSA collection and had units around the
country gather names and license plates of those attending antiwar
rallies and demonstrations. That, in turn, led to creation of files
on these individuals within Army intelligence units. At one point a
Senate Judiciary subcommittee showed the Army had amassed about
18,000 names. In response, Congress in 1978 passed the Foreign
Intelligence Security Act, which limited NSA interception of calls
from overseas to U.S. citizens or those involving American citizens
traveling abroad.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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