NSA spying flap extends to
contents of U.S. Phone Calls
News.CNET – Declan McCullagh – 6/15/2013
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National Security Agency discloses in secret Capitol
Hill briefing that thousands of analysts can listen to domestic phone calls.
That authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too.
The National Security Agency
has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court
authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant said.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New
York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members
of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed
"simply based on an analyst deciding that."
If the NSA wants "to
listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any
other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather
startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the
House Judiciary committee.
Not only does this
disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable
eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice
Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit
thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.
The Washington Post disclosed
Saturday that the existence of a top-secret NSA program called NUCLEON, which
"intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words" to a
database. Top intelligence officials in the Obama administration, the Post
said, "have resolutely refused to offer an estimate of the number of
Americans whose calls or e-mails have thus made their way into content
databases such as NUCLEON."
Earlier reports have
indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and
international phone calls -- in case an analyst needed to access the recordings
in the future. A Wired magazine article
last year disclosed that the NSA has established "listening posts"
that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls
through a massive new data center in Utah, "whether they originate within
the country or overseas." That includes not just metadata, but also the
contents of the communications.
William Binney, a former NSA
technical director who helped to modernize the agency's worldwide eavesdropping
network, told
the Daily Caller this week that the NSA records the phone calls of 500,000 to 1
million people who are on its so-called target list, and perhaps even more.
"They look through these phone numbers and they target those and that's
what they record," Binney said.
Over 1700 comments / 5517
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READER COMMENT: Nobody in the Obama
administration seems to know anything. Perhaps
Obama could form a new cabinet position:
"Someone in Charge of Knowing Something".
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