NSA Gave Other U.S. Agencies Information
From Surveillance
Washington Post
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 1, 2006; Page 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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