From 2012, but very pertinent to today.
Forbes – by Andy Greenberg, 3/20/2012
In his recent bombshell story for Wired magazine, National Security Agency chronicler James Bamford writes that the joke that the agency’s acronym stands for “never say anything” applies now more than ever. In fact, it seems the NSA does speak. It says “no” quite a lot.
In a budget hearing Tuesday in the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee, Georgia Representative Hank Johnson directly questioned NSA director general Keith Alexander about Bamford’s Wired article, which lays out the agency’s domestic spying program in new detail. Alexander denied the article’s claims, which included on-the-record interviews with multiple ex-NSA staffers describing phone- and data-based surveillance of Americans, fourteen times.
Here’s a video of that exchange, with my transcript below. Representative Johnson’s questions are in bold.
General Alexander, if Dick Cheney were elected president and wanted to detain and incessantly waterboard every American who sent an email making fun of his well-known hunting mishaps, what I’d like to know is, does the NSA have the technological capacity to identify those Cheney bashers based upon the content of their emails? Yes or no.
No. Can I explain that?
Yes.
The question is where are the emails and where is NSA’s coverage. I assume by your question that those emails are in the United States.
Correct.
NSA does not have the ability to do that in the United States.
You say the emails are located…Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing. An American emailing another American about Dick Cheney. Does the NSA have capacity to find out who those parties are by monitoring, by the content of their email?
No. In the United States, we’d have to go through an FBI process, a warrant to get that and serve it to somebody to actually get it…
But you do have the capability of doing that.
Not in the United States.
Not without a warrant.
No no, we don’t have the technical insights in the United States. In other words, you have to have something to intercept or some way of doing that either by going to a service provider with a wrrant or you have to be collecting in that area. We’re not authorized to that nor do we have the equipment in the United States to collect that kind of information.
I see. Thank you.
Does that make sense?
Yes it does. General, an article in Wired Magazine reported this month that a whistleblower formerly employed by the NSA has stated NSA signals intercepts include “eavesdropping on domestic phone calls and inspection of domestic emails.” Is that true?
No, not in that context. The question that, what he’s trying to raise is, are we gathering that information the United States. No, that is not correct.
The author of the Wired magazine article, his name is James Bashford, [sic] he writes that NSA has software that “searches U.S. sources for target addresses, locations, countries and phone numbers as well as watchlisted names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on the agency watchlists are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.” Is this true?
No, it’s not. And that’s from James Bashford? [sic]
Yes. Does the NSA routinely intercept American citizens’ emails?
No.
Does the NSA intercept Americans’ cell phone conversations?
No.
Google searches?
No.
Text messages?
No.
Amazon.com orders?
No.
Bank records?
No.
What judicial consent is required for NSA to intercept communications and information involving American citizens?
Within the United States, that would be the FBI lead. If it were a foreign actor in the United States, the FBI would still have to lead. It could work that with NSA or other intelligence agencies as authorized. But to conduct that kind of collection in the United States it would have to go through a court order, and the court would have to authorize it. We’re not authorized to do it, nor do we do it.
Unfortunately, Johnson’s questions aren’t as tough as they might seem. He starts off by focusing only on emails from an American within U.S. borders to an American within U.S. borders, while the debate over domestic wiretapping has long included the hairier question of those abroad communicating with Americans at home. In Bamford’s piece, for instance, he quotes an ex-NSA employee who worked in an NSA facility in Georgia and listened in to conversations between American journalists abroad and their families at home, describing “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.”
Several years ago, when I interviewed Eric Lichtblau, one of the New York Times reporters who broke the warrantless wiretapping story in 2005, he told me that the shift to digital communications is only making the boundary between domestic and foreign spying hazier. “With these newer technologies, as with [voice over Internet protocol], you don’t know physically where a person is located when they receive or send a message. That creates all sorts of headaches in determining what laws apply, and that’s one reason the [Bush] administration is trying to get rid of the distinction altogether.” By assuming that the communications in question started and ended in the U.S., Johnson let Alexander skirt the problem of how that distinction is now defined.
But on other points, Alexander’s denials run directly counter to Bamford’s story. Bamford interviewed Bill Binney, an ex-NSA scientist who says that the NSA’s Stellar Wind program eavesdropped on both domestic phone calls and emails, and specifically gained access to millions of records from AT&TT +1.52%and Verizon. Binney described rooms dotting the country’s communication’s infrastructure that house equipment used for intrusive deep pack inspection. He described a program designed by a BoeingBA -0.24% subsidiary that monitors U.S. communications for names, numbers and addresses, just as Johnson quoted. “Anybody you want, route it to a recorder,” Binney told Bamford. “If your number’s in there? Routed and recorded.”
Don’t expect a more detailed response from the NSA to Bamford’s story. The fact that Alexander doesn’t even know how to pronounce the name of the journalist who has written three definitive books on his agency’s history demonstrates how little accountability NSA feels to its critics. Instead, the agency’s parallel realities–one described from its official sources and another by the whistleblowers emerging from behind its classified walls–will likely keep diverging.
Everything these criminals say is a lie. They lie. That’s their business. Telling truth is unthinkable for these criminals.