[Clips] NSA Gave Other U.S. Agencies Information From Surveillance

[R. A. Hettinga]

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 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/31/AR2005123100808_pf.html>

 The Washington Post


 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
 Sunday, January 1, 2006; A08

 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.

 --
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 R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
 The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
 "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
 [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
 experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'