NSA staff used spy tools on spouses, ex-lovers: watchdog
BY ALINA SELYUKH
WASHINGTON Fri Sep 27, 2013 3:32pm EDT
See also: https://sttpml.org/ibms-role-in-the-nazi-holocaust-what-the-new-documents-reveal-some-of-the-uses-of-metadata-or-from-meta-to-granular-levels-of-surveillance/
An undated aerial handout photo shows the National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters building in Fort Meade, Maryland.
CREDIT: REUTERS/NSA/HANDOUT VIA REUTER
(Reuters) – At least a dozen U.S. National Security Agencyemployees have been caught using secret government surveillance tools to spy on the emails or phone calls of their current or former spouses and lovers in the past decade, according to the intelligence agency’s internal watchdog.
The practice is known in intelligence world shorthand as “LOVEINT” and was disclosed by the NSA Office of the Inspector General in response to a request by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Republican Charles Grassley for a report on abuses of the NSA’s surveillance authority.
In one instance in 2005, a military member of the NSA queried six email addresses of a former American girlfriend – on the first day he obtained access to the data collection system. He later testified that “he wanted to practice on the system” and gained no information as a result of his queries.
In another instance, a foreign woman who was employed by the U.S. government suspected that her lover, an NSA civilian employee, was listening to her phone calls. She shared her suspicion with another government employee, who reported it.
An investigation found the man abused NSA databases from 1998 to 2003 to snoop on nine phone numbers of foreign women and twice collected communications of an American, according to the inspector general’s report.
The NSA’s spying operations have come under intense scrutiny since disclosures this spring by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the U.S. government collects far more Internet and telephone data than previously publicly known.
Many members of Congress and administration officials staunchly defend the NSA surveillance programs as a critical defense tool against terrorist attacks, but privacy advocates say the spying agency’s authority has grown to be too sweeping.
Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the reported incidents of NSA employees’ violations of the law are likely “the tip of the iceberg” of lax data safeguards, but that the laws guiding the NSA’s spying authority in the first place are a bigger issue.
“If you only focus on instances in which the NSA violated those laws, you’re missing the forest for the trees,” he said. “The bigger concern is not with willful violations of the law but rather with what the law itself allows.”
Most of the abuses detailed in the NSA inspector general’s September 11 letter to Grassley were discovered through the agency’s own audits, or self-reports and polygraph interviews with the employees. Their names were not disclosed.
According to the report, a female civilian NSA employee snooped on her husband’s phone conversations after looking up a foreign number she found on his phone because she suspected him of cheating.
Yet another civilian employee, caught abusing the system by looking up the phone numbers of various foreigners she met socially, said she wanted to ensure she was not talking to “shady characters.”
In at least six of the 12 instances reported by the inspector general since January 1, 2003, the matters were referred to the Department of Justice.
In several instances, the violators resigned or retired from their jobs before being disciplined. Others were demoted, given extra days of duty, had their pay cut, and had their access to databases revoked, the report said.
(Reporting by Alina Selyukh; Editing by Christopher Wilson and Marguerita Choy) See whole article at http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/27/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog-idUSBRE98Q14G20130927 and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/27/nsa-spying-exes_n_4002834.html and http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/09/loveint-given-immense-powers-nsa-employees-super-cyber-stalked-their-crushes/
Former NSA whistleblowers plead for chance to brief Obama on agency abuses
Edited time: January 10, 2014 12:52
![AFP Photo / Paul J.Richards<br /><br />](https://cdn.rt.com/files/news/21/c6/10/00/19.si.jpg)
A group of former National Security Agency insiders who went on to become whistleblowers have written a letter to President Barack Obama, requesting a meeting with him to offer “a fuller picture” of the spy agency’s systemic problems.
The group of four intelligence specialists – William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Loomis and Kirk Wiebe – who worked at the NSA for “a total of 144 years, most of them at senior levels” stressed in the letter the need for Obama to address what they’ve seen as abuses that violated Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights and that have made proper, effective intelligence gathering more difficult.
“What we tell you in this Memorandum is merely the tip of the iceberg,” the group, calling themselves the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), wrote. “We are ready – if you are – for an honest conversation. That NSA’s bulk collection is more hindrance than help in preventing terrorist attacks should be clear by now despite the false claims and dissembling.”
The group criticized the NSA for its vast data collection policies, which they say bars the agency from effectively tracking actual terror plots in advance, such as the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013.
The “NSA is drowning in useless data lacking adequate privacy provisions, to the point where it cannot conduct effective terrorist-related surveillance and analysis,” they write. “A recently disclosed internal NSA briefing document corroborates the drowning, with the embarrassing admission, in bureaucratese, that NSA collection has been ‘outpacing’ NSA’s ability to ingest, process, and store data – let alone analyze the take.”
The letter ridicules current and former intelligence community leaders like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper – for lying to Congress – and current NSA director Keith Alexander and its former chief Michael Hayden for purposely distorting the efficiency and vitality of the agency’s surveillance programs.
“Surely you intuit that something is askew when NSA Director Keith Alexander testifies to Congress that NSA’s bulk collection has ‘thwarted’ 54 terrorist plots and later, under questioning, is forced to reduce that number to one, which cannot itself withstand close scrutiny. And surely you understand why former NSA Director and CIA Director Michael Hayden protests too much and too often on Fox News and CNN, and why he and House Intelligence Committee Mike Rogers publicly suggest that whistleblower Edward Snowden be put on your Kill List.”
“Does a blind loyalty prevail in your White House to the point where, 40 years after Watergate, there is not a single John Dean to warn you of a “cancer on the presidency?” Have none of your lawyers reminded you that “electronic surveillance of private citizens … subversive of constitutional government” was one of the three Articles of Impeachment against President Richard Nixon approved by a bipartisan 28 to 10 vote of the House Judiciary Committee on July 27, 1974?”
The VIPS letter indicates the combined insight and expertise of these respected intelligence analysts – all ridiculed and some prosecuted after calling attention to NSA abuses years before anyone had heard of former NSA contractor and leaker Edward Snowden – can be important in the face of an establishment community in Washington seeking to shelter the mass surveillance programs in question.
“Given the closed circle surrounding you, we are allowing for the possibility that the smell from these rotting red herrings has not yet reached you – even though your own Review Group has found, for example, that NSA’s bulk collection has thwarted exactly zero terrorist plots,” they write, referring to an Obama-appointed panel that was tasked with reviewing NSA procedures.”
“The sadder reality, Mr. President, is that NSA itself had enough information to prevent 9/11, but chose to sit on it rather than share it with the FBI or CIA. We know; we were there. We were witness to the many bureaucratic indignities that made NSA at least as culpable for pre-9/11 failures as are other U.S. intelligence agencies.”
The VIPS revisit much of the information already reported, including the case of NSA senior executive Drake’s attempts to convince agency heads that a program developed by Binney should have been used for crucial intelligence gathering. THINTHREAD, produced for a relatively small amount of money shortly before the 9/11 attacks, sorted information without violating the Fourth Amendment or NSA’s privacy standards, the VIPS write.
But instead, then-NSA director Michael Hayden chose a different program, STELLARWIND, produced by defense contractors that cost billions of dollars while violating Fourth Amendment and privacy rights. Drake sounded the alarm, continuing to push for THINTHREAD use even after all its developers left the NSA in October 2011. In his steady support for the discarded program, he found out how much actionable intelligence the NSA had legally gathered that could have thwarted the 9/11 attacks, he says.
Upon being asked to prepare a report at the request of Congress on the NSA’s knowledge of the 9/11 plot and hijackers before September 11, 2001, Drake says the agency decided to balk at taking any responsibility.
“After a couple of weeks [SIGINT chief Maureen] Baginski rejected my draft team Statement for the Record report and removed me from the task,” Drake writes. “When I asked her why, she said there was a ‘data integrity problem’ (not further explained) with my draft Statement for the Record. I had come upon additional damaging revelations. For example, NSA had the content of telephone calls between AA-77 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar in San Diego, CA, and the known al-Qaeda safe house switchboard in Yemen well before 9/11, and had not disseminated that information beyond NSA.”
“In short, when confronted with the prospect of fessing up, NSA chose instead to obstruct the 9/11 congressional investigation, play dumb, and keep the truth buried, including the fact that it knew about all inbound and outbound calls to the safe house switchboard in Yemen. NSA’s senior leaders took me off the task because they realized – belatedly, for some reason – that I would not take part in covering up the truth about how much NSA knew but did not share.”
The letter, with the subject line “Input for Your Decisions on NSA,” is timed to coincide with deliberations currently happening in the Obama administration to confront recommended NSA reforms from the panel.
Last month, the five-person review group, made up of intelligence and administration insiders, assembled by Obama presented the White House with a report suggesting that the NSA consider dozens of recommendations meant to reform some of the operations exposed through leaks supplied by Snowden. After that report was completed but before the president went on vacation in late December, Obama said he’d make a “pretty definitive statement about all of this in January.”
The President is now expected to weigh in on those recommendations publically during the annual State of the Union address scheduled for January 28 in Washington.
Obama will reportedly hold a closed-door meeting with select officials on this week in advance of the public speech to discuss in private the future of the controversial surveillance operations waged by the NSA.
NSA Whistleblowers: NSA Collects ‘Word for Word’ Every Domestic Communication
Anyone Who Says the Government Only Spies On Metadata Is Sadly Mistaken
PBS interviewed NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Russell Tice this week.
Binney is the NSA’s former director of global digital data, and a 32-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency. Tice helped the NSA spy with satellites for 20 years.
Binney and Tice confirmed that the NSA is recording every word of every phone call made within the United States:
[PBS INTERVIEWER] JUDY WOODRUFF: Both Binney and Tice suspect that today, the NSA is doing more than just collecting metadata on calls made in the U.S. They both point to this CNN interview by former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente days after the Boston Marathon bombing. Clemente was asked if the government had a way to get the recordings of the calls between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his wife.
TIM CLEMENTE, former FBI counterterrorism agent: On the national security side of the house, in the federal government, you know, we have assets. There are lots of assets at our disposal throughout the intelligence community and also not just domestically, but overseas. Those assets allow us to gain information, intelligence on things that we can’t use ordinarily in a criminal investigation.
All digital communications are — there’s a way to look at digital communications in the past. And I can’t go into detail of how that’s done or what’s done. But I can tell you that no digital communication is secure.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Tice says after he saw this interview on television, he called some former workmates at the NSA.
RUSSELL TICE: Well, two months ago, I contacted some colleagues at NSA. We had a little meeting, and the question came up, was NSA collecting everything now? Because we kind of figured that was the goal all along. And the answer came back. It was, yes, they are collecting everything, contents word for word, everything of every domestic communication in this country.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Both of you know what the government says is that we’re collecting this — we’re collecting the number of phone calls that are made, the e-mails, but we’re not listening to them.
WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, I don’t believe that for a minute. OK?
I mean, that’s why they had to build Bluffdale, that facility in Utah with that massive amount of storage that could store all these recordings and all the data being passed along the fiberoptic networks of the world. I mean, you could store 100 years of the world’s communications here. That’s for content storage. That’s not for metadata.
Metadata if you were doing it and putting it into the systems we built, you could do it in a 12-by-20-foot room for the world. That’s all the space you need. You don’t need 100,000 square feet of space that they have at Bluffdale to do that. You need that kind of storage for content.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, what does that say, Russell Tice, about what the government — you’re saying — your understanding is of what the government does once these conversations take place, is it your understanding they’re recorded and kept?
RUSSELL TICE: Yes, digitized and recorded and archived in a facility that is now online. And they’re kind of fibbing about that as well, because Bluffdale is online right now.
And that’s where the information is going. Now, as far as being able to have an analyst look at all that, that’s impossible, of course. And I think, semantically, they’re trying to say that their definition of collection is having literally a physical analyst look or listen, which would be disingenuous.
Slate confirms that the NSA is playing word games:
Collect. If an intelligence official says that the NSA isn’t “collecting” a certain kind of information, what has he actually said? Not very much, it turns out. One of the NSA’sfoundational documents states that “collection” occurs not when the government acquires information but when the government “selects” or “tasks” that information for “subsequent processing.” Thus it becomes possible for the government to acquire great reams of information while denying that it is “collecting” anything at all.
Indeed, the government is spying on just about everything we do.