[Infowarrior] - NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say If We Spied on You

[Richard Forno]

Danger Room (Wired.com)
June 18, 2012

NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say If We Spied on You

By Spencer Ackerman

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/

The surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won’t tell two
powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their
communications picked up by the agency as part of its sweeping new
counterterrorism powers. The reason: it would violate your privacy to say
so.

That claim comes in a short letter sent Monday to civil libertarian Senators
Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. The two members of the Senate’s intelligence
oversight committee asked the NSA a simple question last month: under the
broad powers granted in 2008′s expansion of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, how many persons inside the United States have been spied
upon by the NSA?

The query bounced around the intelligence bureaucracy until it reached I.
Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence, the nominal head of the 16 U.S. spy agencies. In a
letter acquired by Danger Room, McCullough told the senators that the NSA
inspector general “and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort
suggested would further violate the privacy of U.S. persons,” McCullough
wrote.

“All that Senator Udall and I are asking for is a ballpark estimate of how
many Americans have been monitored under this law, and it is disappointing
that the Inspectors General cannot provide it,” Wyden told Danger Room on
Monday. “If no one will even estimate how many Americans have had their
communications collected under this law then it is all the more important
that Congress act to close the ‘back door searches’ loophole, to keep the
government from searching for Americans’ phone calls and emails without a
warrant.”

What’s more, McCullough argued, giving such a figure of how many Americans
were spied on was “beyond the capacity” of the NSA’s in-house watchdog ― and
to rectify it would require “imped[ing]” the very spy missions that concern
Wyden and Udall. “I defer to [the NSA inspector general's] conclusion that
obtaining such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office and
dedicating sufficient additional resources would likely impede the NSA’s
mission,” McCullough wrote.

The changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008 ― which
President Obama, then in the Senate, voted for ― relaxed the standards under
which communications with foreigners that passed through the United States
could be collected by the spy agency. The NSA, for instance, no longer
requires probable cause to intercept a person’s phone calls, text messages
or emails within the United States as long as one party to the
communications is “reasonably” believed to be outside the United States.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008, as it’s known, legalized an expansive
effort under the Bush administration that authorized NSA surveillance on
persons inside the United States without a warrant in cases of suspicion of
connections to terrorism. As my colleague David Kravets has reported, Wyden
has attempted to slow a renewal of the 2008 surveillance authorities making
its way through Congress. The House Judiciary Committee is expected to
address the FISA Amendments Act on Tuesday, as the 2008 law expires this
year.

Longtime intelligence watchers found the stonewalling of an “entirely
legitimate oversight question” to be “disappointing and unsatisfactory,” as
Steve Aftergood, a secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists
told Danger Room.

“If the FISA Amendments Act is not susceptible to oversight in this way,”
Aftergood said, “it should be repealed, not renewed.”

Even though McCullough said the spy agencies wouldn’t tell the senators how
many Americans have been spied upon under the new authorities, he told them
he “firmly believe[s] that oversight of intelligence collection is a proper
function of an Inspector General. I will continue to work with you and the
[Senate intelligence] Committee to identify ways we can enhance our ability
to conduct effective oversight.”