If you’re Izzy the Pizza Guy, and you just happen to
take a call from the next Mohammed Atta, well, tough
rocks, pal. You cannot expect the government to put
your interest of privacy over the public’s interest
in preventing the attack.
WHAT WE REALLY NEED TO KNOW ABOUT NSA WIRETAPS
TKS
jim geraghty reporting
1) What has this program found since the change in policy?
From the Los Angeles Times on Sunday:
<<< One of the former intelligence officials said it was designed to enable them
"to follow up on anything and exhaust all possible leads"
at a time when "the threat level couldn't be any higher." Much of the NSA's activity was driven by CIA operations.
"We would say, any call from this number — whether it goes
to Brooklyn or Tashkent — listen in on it," the former
official said. "The freedom was needed to follow the traffic,
the phone traffic, wherever it went." The former official,
who defended the program, added: "You have to remember that
up until the Patriot Act, [NSA eavesdropping experts] had
to hang up even if they had Osama bin Laden talking to an
American."
The second former official said the program contributed to the apprehension of Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver who pleaded guilty in 2003 to collaborating with Al Qaeda in a plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge.
The NSA effort was suspended at one point because of objections from a judge, but was subsequently resumed and was still active as recently as several months ago, one of the former officials said. >>>
From the New York Times, back on June 20, 2003:
<<< The truck driver, Iyman Faris, a 34-year-old naturalized American citizen from Kashmir living in Columbus, Ohio, was secretly arrested about three months ago. Mr. Faris agreed to plead guilty in May in closed proceedings before a federal judge in Virginia to charges that he had provided material support to terrorists, officials said today. He now faces 20 years in prison.
Prosecutors said Mr. Faris traveled in Afghanistan and Pakistan beginning in 2000, meeting with Osama bin Laden and working with one of his top lieutenants, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, to help organize and finance jihad causes. After returning to the United States in late 2002, officials said, he began casing the Brooklyn Bridge and discussing via coded messages with Qaeda leaders ways of using blowtorches to sever the suspension cables.
The plotting continued through March, as Mr. Faris sent coded messages to Qaeda operatives in Pakistan. One such message said that "the weather is too hot." Officials said that meant that Mr. Faris feared that the plot was unlikely to succeed — apparently because of security and the bridge's structure — and should be postponed. He was arrested soon after, although officials would not discuss the circumstances of his capture…
The New York City Police Department, which was told of the plot in March, said it considered the threat so serious that it had increased land and marine patrols around the Brooklyn Bridge several months ago. "He is the principal reason why we have the kind of security you see on the Brooklyn Bridge," a law enforcement official said of Mr. Faris.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said: "We spend a great deal of effort and money in keeping this city secure. In this case, it appears that money was well spent. It may have saved the Brooklyn Bridge." …
Mr. Faris was arrested soon after sending the message overseas about the bridge being "too hot" to attack, but the authorities refused to say how or where he was apprehended or what led them to him. Details cited in court documents indicated that the F.B.I. might have used electronic surveillance or intelligence sources to track his activities, but Mr. Ashcroft and other officials refused to discuss the surveillance because they said it could compromise national security. >>>
Guess we know what program did the electronic surveillance of Faris’ message now.
2) Has this program eavesdropped on two Americans who had no connection to terrorism whatsoever?
We know, from the original Times article, that all of the phone numbers and e-mail addresses that this program started with originated from captured al-Qaeda records.
<<< What the agency calls a ''special collection program'' began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said.
In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said. >>>
If your phone number is in an al-Qaeda member’s day planner, I want the good guys to know whether you’re his pizza delivery guy or his anthrax supplier. I’m sure checking every lead and number means the NSA is going to listen to some folks with no substantive ties. However, I’d much rather be safe than sorry, and I’d love to know how the NSA is supposed to determine an individual’s ties to the al-Qaeda member without listening to their communications.
If you’re Izzy the Pizza Guy, and you just happen to take a call from the next Mohammed Atta, well, tough rocks, pal. You cannot expect the government to put your interest of privacy over the public’s interest in preventing the attack.
Jeff at Protein Wisdom put it well:
If the Dems’ argument is that, should an al Qaeda operative
phone a US number, the NSA should hang up for fear of
violating the rights of US citizen—even though there is no
evidence the government ever planned to use the information
gleaned in a criminal proceeding—well, then, let them make
that case.
Do NSA investigators sometimes come up with a dry hole? The best clue we have comes from a comment by former N.S.A. director Gen. Michael V. Hayden in the New York Times today:
General Hayden, at this week's briefing, would not discuss
many technical aspects of the program and did not answer
directly when asked whether the program was used to
eavesdrop on people who should not have been. But he
indicated that N.S.A. operational personnel sometimes
decide to stop surveillance of a suspect when the
eavesdropping has not produced relevant leads on terror
cases.
"We can't waste resources on targets that simply don't
provide valuable information, and when we decide that is
the case," the decision on whether a target is "worthwhile"
is usually made in days or weeks, he said.
3) If the NSA did eavesdrop on conversations of two American citizens with no terror connections, what did the agency do to the recordings of the chats?
If the NSA was tipped off to a conversation about “striking a mighty blow against the evil empire of Yankee imperialists” and it turned out to be a conversation between “Shannen” and “Theo” about the Red Sox, then what happens to the recording or transcripts? If they’re sitting in some NSA archive, I would have a gripe – if for no other reason than it’s a waste of government resources. If the NSA technicians say, “this is nonsense, we don’t need twenty minutes of these two analyzing Boston’s middle relief,” and shred the transcript, erase the tape, etc., then I’m not sure what the wrongdoing is here.
I’m sure some will claim, “right to privacy,” but really, I want a stronger emanation of a penumbra than that before I shut down a program that caught a guy trying to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge.
Just who has this program harmed besides bridge bombers?
Looking at the Post’s story resignation of the FISA court judge:
Robertson indicated privately to colleagues in recent
conversations that he was concerned that information
gained from warrantless NSA surveillance could have then
been used to obtain FISA warrants. FISA court Presiding
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who had been briefed on the
spying program by the administration, raised the same
concern in 2004 and insisted that the Justice Department
certify in writing that it was not occurring.
"They just don't know if the product of wiretaps were used
for FISA warrants — to kind of cleanse the information,"
said one source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because of the classified nature of the FISA warrants.
"What I've heard some of the judges say is they feel
they've participated in a Potemkin court."
Critics of the program are dealing in theoreticals. Possibly, the government has listened to conversations between two American citizens, with no ties to terrorism. Possibly, they have kept the recordings or transcripts. Possibly, the secret recordings were used to get FISA warrants.
The defenders of the program, by comparison, can point to particular certainties – like the capture of would-be Brooklyn Bridge bomber, Iyman Faris.
tks.nationalreview.com
proteinwisdom.com
nytimes.com
nationalreview.com
boston.about.com
washingtonpost.com |
