Senate kills bill to overhaul NSA spying
A promised end to mass surveillance after whistleblower Edward Snowden rocked the world with his revelations of how much America was spying have fallen apart. But who cares about Snowden ...
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NWO and the United States: NSA, police state and increased surveillance (2)
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June 6, 2013: A sign stands outside the National Security Agency (NSA) campus in Fort Meade, Md.(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
WASHINGTON Dissenters within the National Security Agency, led by a senior agency executive, warned in 2009 that the program to secretly collect American phone records wasn't providing enough intelligence to justify the backlash it would cause if revealed, current and former intelligence officials say.
The NSA took the concerns seriously, and many senior officials shared them. But after an internal debate that has not been previously reported, NSA leaders, White House officials and key lawmakers opted to continue the collection and storage of American calling records, a domestic surveillance program without parallel in the agency's recent history.
The warnings proved prophetic last year after the calling records program was made public in the first and most significant leak by Edward Snowden, a former NSA systems administrator who cited the government's deception about the program as one of his chief motivations for turning over classified documents to journalists. Many Americans were shocked and dismayed to learn that an intelligence agency collects and stores all their landline calling records.
In response, President Barack Obama is now trying to stop the NSA collection but preserve the agency's ability to search the records in the hands of the telephone companies an arrangement similar to the one the administration quietly rejected in 2009. But his plan, drawing opposition from most Republicans, fell two votes short of advancing in the Senate on Tuesday.
A now-retired NSA senior executive, who was a longtime code-breaker who rose to top management, had just learned in 2009 about the top secret program that was created shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He says he argued to then-NSA Director Keith Alexander that storing the calling records of nearly every American fundamentally changed the character of the agency, which is supposed to eavesdrop on foreigners, not Americans.
Alexander politely disagreed, the former official told The Associated Press.
The former official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he didn't have permission to discuss a classified matter, said he knows of no evidence the program was used for anything other than hunting for terrorism plots in the U.S. But he said he and others made the case that the collection of American records in bulk crossed a line that had been sacrosanct.
He said he also warned of a scandal if it should be disclosed that the NSA was storing records of private calls by Americans to psychiatrists, lovers and suicide hotlines, among other contacts.
Alexander, who led the NSA from 2005 until he retired last year, did not dispute the former official's account, though he said he disagreed that the program was improper.
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NSA continued to collect phone data despite internal warning of backlash
The U.S. National Security Agency is planning no major changes in its domestic telephone records collection program after a bill to rein in those efforts failed in the Senate this week, the agencys director said.
The NSA will continue to collect U.S. telephone records in bulk, while operating under some restrictions President Barack Obama put on the program back in January, Admiral Michael Rogers, the NSAs director, said during a House of Representatives hearing on cybersecurity Thursday. The NSA would rather wait to see what specific changes to the program Congress will require before making major changes, he told the House Intelligence Committee.
The NSA had hoped to get direction from Congress in the short term, but the agency may have to re-evaluate the telephone records program if were unable to gain consensus in the window that we thought, Rogers said. I dont have an answer to that in my own mind.
The NSA should take steps to end its bulk collection of U.S. phone records even though the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would have left the data in the hands of telecom carriers, failed in the Senate this week, said Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat. Theres nothing in statute that requires the government to gather bulk data, so you could move forward on your own with making the technological changes, Schiff said. You dont have to wait for the USA Freedom Act.
Theres no reason for the NSA to wait for congressional approval to put additional limits on the program if you think this is the correct policy, Schiff added. Why continue to gather the bulk metadata if [Obama administration officials] dont think this is the best approach?
But Rogers defended the phone records program, saying it has provided valuable antiterrorism intelligence to federal investigators.
The program operates under court and congressional oversight, and since January the NSA has needed approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before querying the database of collected phone records, he said. Obama in January largely left the program intact while Congress debates it, Rogers said.
I dont think Ive heard the president or the [director of national intelligence] say that the access to the data is not of value, Rogers said. What I think Ive heard is, the question gets to be who should hold the data.
The public has several misconceptions about NSA surveillance programs, said Representative Mike Rogers, the Intelligence Committees chairman and a Michigan Republican. The NSA is not penetrating U.S. computer networks, he said.
The NSA is not on American domestic networks, but the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and multiple other bad actors are, Representative Rogers said.
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NSA director: No changes in telephone record collection coming