JUDY WOODRUFF: And we pick up on the continuing fallout from the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Last night, we debated the role of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence court, which approves the government's requests to gather intelligence information on Americans.
Tonight, we have a conversation with three former NSA officials, a former inspector general and two NSA veterans who blew the whistle on what they say were abuses and mismanagement at the secret government intelligence agency.
William Binney worked at the NSA for over three decades as a mathematician, where he designed systems for collecting and analyzing large amounts of data. He retired in 2001. And Russell Tice had a two-decade career with the NSA where he focused on collection and analysis. He says he was fired in 2005 after calling on Congress to provide greater protection to whistle-blowers.
He claims the NSA tapped the phone of high-level government officials and the news media 10 years ago.
RUSSELL TICE, former National Security Agency analyst: The United States were, at that time, using satellites to spy on American citizens. At that time, it was news organizations, the State Department, including Colin Powell, and an awful lot of senior military people and industrial types.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, this is the early 2000s.
RUSSELL TICE: This was in 2002-2003 time frame. The NSA were targeting individuals. In that case, they were judges like the Supreme Court. I held in my hand Judge Alito's targeting information for his phones and his staff and his family.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Bill Binney, what was your sense of who was being targeted and why they were being targeted? And what was being collected, in other words?
WILLIAM BINNEY, former National Security Agency technical leader: Well, I wasn't aware of specific targeting like Russ was. I just saw the inputs were including hundreds of millions of records of phone calls of U.S. citizens every day. So it was virtually -- there wasn't anybody who wasn't a part of this collection of information.
So, virtually, you could target anybody in this country you wanted.
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.
JUDY WOODRUFF: But the government vehemently denies it is recording all telephone calls. Robert Litt is the general counsel in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He recently spoke at the Brookings Institution.
ROBERT LITT, NSA general counsel: We do not indiscriminately sweep up and store the contents of the communications of Americans or of the citizenry of any country. We do collect metadata, information about communications, more broadly than we collect the actual content of communications, but that's because it is less intrusive than collecting content and in fact can provide us information that helps us more narrowly focus our collection of content on appropriate foreign intelligence targets.
But it simply is not true that the United States government is listening to everything said by the citizens of any country.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Joel Brenner, who was the NSA's inspector general and then senior legal counsel, says the intelligence agency obeys the law and the directions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court.
JOEL BRENNER, former NSA inspector general: It's really important to understand that the NSA hasn't done anything, as I understand it and from all I know, that goes one inch beyond what it's been authorized to do by a court.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, tell us, how extensive is the NSA's collection of data on American citizens, on their phone calls, on their e-mails, on their use of the Internet?
JOEL BRENNER: This the program only involves telephony metadata, not e-mails, not geographic location information.
The idea that NSA is keeping files on Americans, as a general rule, just isn't true. There's no basis for believing that. The idea that NSA is compiling dossiers on people the way J. Edgar Hoover did in the '40s and '50s or the way the East German police did, as some people allege, that's just not true.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we have been talking to a couple of former NSA employees and one of the allegations they make is that it's not just collecting this metadata on telephone conversations; it's recording those conversations and it's storing them and keeping them for possible future use.
JOEL BRENNER: I think you're talking about Mr. Tice and Mr. Binney.
Mr. Binney hasn't been at the agency since 2001. Mr. Tice hasn't been at the agency since 2005. They don't know what's going on inside the agency.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Another allegation we heard from them, from Mr. Tice, is that back as of the time before he left the NSA in the early 2000s, that there was spying going on, on news organizations, on Supreme Court justices, on presidential candidates, then Senator Barack Obama, on military leaders, top generals in the army.
JOEL BRENNER: Mr. Tice made the allegations you have just indicated having to do with the period before 2005, eight years ago. They're just coming out now. I wonder why.
The farther he gets from the period when he could have known what he was talking about, the more fanciful his allegations have become.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Brenner claims that oversight of information gathering has actually improved.
JOEL BRENNER: We have turned intelligence into a regulated industry in a way that none of our allies, even in Europe, have done.
We have all three branches of government now involved in overseeing the activities of the NSA, the CIA, the DIA, and our other intelligence apparatus. This is an enormous achievement.
MAN: Government has gone too far in the name of security, that the Fourth Amendment has been bruised.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Last week, one oversight proposal in Congress aimed at preventing the NSA from collecting date on phone calls was narrowly defeated, but some members are vowing to press for additional restrictions on the investigative agency.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec13/whistleblowers_08-01.html
Published on Aug 1, 2013
Two former National Security Agency
analysts talk about when they discovered the agency was collecting more
data on American citizens.
Obama Administration Reveals Details of Secret NSA Phone Surveillance Program
31JUL13The government released heavily redacted documents that showed, broadly, how the National Security Agency uses the data. And, in London, The Guardian newspaper published images of what analysts see, under a program known as XKeyscore.
For more, we turn to Charlie Savage, who's covering the story for The New York Times.
Charlie Savage, because you're covering this story, tell me what new you saw in these documents today.
CHARLIE SAVAGE, The New York Times: Right.
Well, as you said, there were two sets of documents. There was an officially released set of documents that the intelligence community and the Obama administration wanted the public to see. And those concerned this program which has been collecting for years every phone call died or received in the United States.
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That would be browsing habits, search terms on Google and other such Web sites, what's being said in encrypted chat sessions and so forth, two very different programs.
GWEN IFILL: Yes. That's the XKeyscore one you're talking about.
Is that something perhaps foreign governments know that we are doing?
CHARLIE SAVAGE: From the document, we can see that the five countries in the sort of Anglosphere, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, must all be participating in this knowingly, but the number of dots where there are collection site servers scattered around the world, including some countries that are not friendly to the United States, suggest that there are countries that didn't know this was happening, and I suspect we will see some reaction around the world as this starts to get digested.
GWEN IFILL: The Obama administration has said since the beginning we're gathering metadata, but we're not actually listening in on phone calls, we're not actually gathering information, unless we have some reason.
Was there anything in either of these two sets of documents today that would undercut that argument?
CHARLIE SAVAGE: Well, again, you have to separate the two of them, and that also goes to the statement that you cited the administration as saying.
When it comes to collecting metadata, calling logs, who called whom inside the United States, yes, by definition that doesn't include content, what was said. Of course, they do wiretap all the time. It's just not through that program. And there's extra rules and court approval for wiretapping inside the United States.
There are essentially no rules for surveillance abroad. The U.S. Constitution doesn't cover non-citizens not on U.S. soil. The domestic wiretapping laws are written to exclude that kind of foreign intelligence collection activity. It's kind of open season. Whatever a country can get away with, it does in the espionage world.
And what we have seen in the last few weeks with all these leaks from Edward Snowden from the NSA is that the United States really can do quite a lot, more even than was long suspected about their capacity to just vacuum up, process and spy on what the world is doing on its telecommunications networks.
GWEN IFILL: What these domestic documents that were released today, that were declassified today showed us is -- confirmed some of the things that the Edward Snowden leaks told us about major phone companies like Verizon turning over documents to the government.
Do we have any idea how widely that -- how much information was gathered and what use the government makes of it?
CHARLIE SAVAGE: Well, so, this is the key question that senators today at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing and lawmakers generally have been asking about this domestic phone log collection program involving Americans' communications, which is we can see how on paper it's useful.
And you already have the data. It's all in one big set. If you want to go look and see you know, this person is a suspect, who have they been in contact with, who have those people in turn been in contact with, you can very quickly do that if you have already collected the data of everybody. If you have the haystack, you can go searching for the needles.
But the question they keep asking is, has this actually thwarted any plot? We know that the collection overseas appears to have been quite useful. This data that leaked today suggested that 300 terrorists as of 2008 have been identified from this overseas collection, but what about the domestic collection that has these implications for Americans' privacy rights?
And the intelligence community has really struggled to come up with compelling examples of how this is not merely a theoretically useful tool, but one that has actually stopped something from happening that otherwise would have happened.
GWEN IFILL: Are they persuading anybody in the House or the Senate that that is so -- what we saw last week, that the House vote came very close to outlawing this kind of activity. Was there still more skepticism today?
CHARLIE SAVAGE: Certainly, I think most notably today at the Judiciary Committee hearing, the Democratic chairman of that committee, who is a very powerful figure in the Senate, Patrick Leahy, said that he had been looking at a classified list of terrorist events that had been disrupted by various surveillance programs, and that he saw very little on it that suggested that there was utility to this American phone log program.
He said if it doesn't seem to be effective, then it should be shut down, and so far he's not persuaded. And so despite fact that members of the Intelligence Committee -- at least leaders of them -- have been -- who knew about this all along have been trying to defend it and the intelligence community in the Obama administration, a lot of which are career officials who span administrations, have been trying to defend it, we see skepticism, bipartisan skepticism in both chambers of Congress.
GWEN IFILL: Sounds like more shoes yet to drop.
Charlie Savage of The New York Times, thanks for keeping track for us.
CHARLIE SAVAGE: Thank you.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec13/nsa_07-31.html31JUL13
JEFFREY BROWN: As new revelations of data gathering continue to come out, the role of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, or FISA, court has come under increasing scrutiny. We take a closer look now.
The story of the court goes back to 1978. The Senate's Church Committee, among others, had chronicled surveillance abuses by the government brought to light in the Watergate scandal. One response, Congress created the FISA court to review warrants for national security investigations.
Many years and several amendments later, the Snowden disclosures of surveillance by the NSA have raised new questions.
On Sunday, for example, the Senate's Democratic majority whip, Dick Durbin, argued that the court is hardly impartial.
SEN. RICHARD DURBIN, D-Ill.: It's fixed in a way. It's loaded. There's only one case coming before the FISA court, the government's case. Let's have an advocate for someone standing up for civil liberties to speak up about the privacy of Americans when they make each of these decisions.
JEFFREY BROWN: But at today's Senate hearing, Deputy Attorney General James Cole said there's no clear precedent for changing the way warrants are approved.
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JEFFREY BROWN: Another issue, the FISA court's 11 judges are chosen by the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and all of the current members have been selected by Chief Justice John Roberts.
Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona raised that issue at today's hearing.
SEN. JEFF FLAKE, R- Ariz.: There's been some criticism that the process that we have for the selection of these judges may lead to more Republican judges being appointed than Democratic. Is that an issue that somebody ought to be concerned about, or have you seen any difference in decisions rendered?
JAMES COLE: I haven't seen any decisions. The judges are judges. And they're being guided by the law and not necessarily by politics, but that's certainly a topic we would leave to the sound discretion of the Congress.
JEFFREY BROWN: Already, there are proposals in Congress bring raised to change the way the court operates and how its members are named.
And we raise these questions and more now with James Bamford, a journalist, lawyer and author of several books on the National Security Agency, and Steven Bradbury, head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration.
Welcome to both of you.
JAMES BAMFORD, author: Thank you.
JEFFREY BROWN: Jim Bamford, we heard earlier this Gwen's discussion about new revelations. What do you think of those and what do they tell us about this role of the FISA court?
JAMES BAMFORD: Well, these new revelations are really an expansive -- look at a much more expansive eavesdropping capability.
We looked before at the telephone and the e-mail. Now, this is pretty much the Internet. And it's very worrisome, in the sense that people when they communicate on the Internet are communicating basically their thoughts, their deepest thoughts in their minds a lot of times, their thoughts sometimes that they don't want to share with anybody else.
So, if you have this mega-collection that's going -- and again, it raises the question of what oversight is there and what checks and balances are there? We didn't see there were very many checks and balances on the other systems. And maybe the same thing applies here.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right. We will walk through some of those issues,.
But, first, generally, what's your thought, Steven Bradbury?
STEVEN BRADBURY, former Department of Justice official: Well, I think it's important to focus on what the government declassified and disclosed about the FISA process.
And two things I take from that. One, it shows that there was a lot of detail provided to Congress in 2009 and 2011 about the telephone metadata collection, great detail describing the collection, the scope, how it was used, the limitations.
JEFFREY BROWN: So, you're saying it wasn't just left to the court. Congress had a say as well.
STEVEN BRADBURY: That's correct.
And the documents show that every member of Congress was invited to review those descriptions in Congress and so had the opportunity to understand the full scope. They also disclosed the FISA court order, the primary order for the telephone metadata collection. And I think it very clearly shows the degree of oversight, all of the protections and the limitations. It goes into great detail, very consistent with what the government has been describing in its hearings on the Hill.
JEFFREY BROWN: But you see that and you see not enough oversight?
JAMES BAMFORD: Well, I...
JEFFREY BROWN: Some people have used this rubber-stamp term.
JAMES BAMFORD: Well, I read the documents that the government released today on the -- where they say they briefed every member of Congress on this program, but I saw nowhere in those documents where it described the full extent of it.
It said, this is a very big program, but it didn't anywhere say that we're targeting every single person in the United States, 300 million people. So that's why you have this reaction from people in Congress that are saying that, well, we had no idea it was this big, that it was every single person, every single day, every single telephone call, the metadata from it.
JEFFREY BROWN: What's the chief -- the chief problem you have with the FISA court itself? As we said, it was set up in 1978 under some previous times of concern, right?
JAMES BAMFORD: That's right. It was working very fine up until the Bush administration.
And that's when the Bush administration decided to violate the law and go around the FISA court.
JEFFREY BROWN: How?
JAMES BAMFORD: Well, they decided that they didn't trust the court to -- that they felt the court was going to probably disapprove their plan for this warrantless eavesdropping program, so they decided to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and go around the court and do the warrantless eavesdropping without ever informing the court, although they told the chief justice, the presiding judge in the court, but not -- asked the judge not to tell the other judges.
So you have this -- after 9/11, you have this effort by the administration not only to bypass the court, but to weaken the court after these revelations were discovered. So that was what happened in the FISA Amendments Act, where they actually weakened the court. And I think that's what's changed a lot of the dynamics of the court since then.
JEFFREY BROWN: I know you see an alternative history here. Right?
STEVEN BRADBURY: I do.
I actually think this is a great story in terms of history for the United States, because I think we faced the challenges of 9/11. There were limitations seen in the system. It wasn't workable for what needed to be done to protect the country. And Congress and the president over the years since have come together.
And we have new statutes, amendments to FISA, that have made the process more effective, more streamlined, and I think that's been a very good story.
JEFFREY BROWN: But if the FISA court has approved it sounds like most everything that's been brought to it, does that suggest that it is doing enough to look at all the data, look at the questions, raise the issues, the concerns that people have about privacy?
STEVEN BRADBURY: Well, in fact, in my experience, the FISA court and the legal advisers who are permanent staff to the court ask a lot of hard questions up front.
In other words, they get read-ahead copies of applications. There's a lot of back-and-forth, a lot of testing, a lot of additional information provided. So there's a good understanding of the legal basis and factual basis for applications when they're actually signed and submitted so that the court process can move under efficiently and quickly.
JEFFREY BROWN: What do you think of that? What do you think needs to be done? What would you like to see done to strengthen the court?
JAMES BAMFORD: Well, there are a couple of things.
First of all, the court is packed, as somebody just said earlier. And you have got 11 judges -- or you have got 10 out of 11 judges that are appointed by a chief judge who really appoints them as part of his own party. They're all Republican appointees pretty much, conservative people. So you have got them very much packed in one ideological viewpoint.
And, second of all, it's all ex parte. In other words, there's only one side that argue argues in front of it, and that's the government. So one of the different ways to get around that is you can appoint a sort of professional advocate who is fully cleared and can argue both sides.
This isn't a normal wiretapping case, where you're talking about one criminal defendant in a bank robbery or something. This is where you're talking about 300 million people being -- having their records taken. There's no real comparison. And you can also have the judge -- or have the judges appointed by the federal appeals court judges.
JEFFREY BROWN: Is this an area where we could get any agreement, that there are some reforms possible?
STEVEN BRADBURY: Well, I don't think reforms are needed in the system. But, obviously, Congress will look at options. I don't believe the chief justice has made any appointments based on partisan politics or who appointed which judges.
And we have a tradition in this country. When a federal judge has been confirmed to the bench for a lifetime appointment, the judge is not a political person at that point, and independent judgment is brought to bear. And I think that's -- I think the chief justice works with the Administrative Office of the Judiciary on these appointments, and it's a question of which judges are interested in serving and have the time to serve.
There's a lot of questions that go into that, and I have faith that the chief justice has done a good job. In terms of the advocate, difficult practical issues there. You can't create a new office that's not in the executive branch or not working under the court.
So it's going to be in the system if you're going to have a special advocate like that. And I'm not sure it would really achieve what the advocates of that favor.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right. Well, I know that and others are on the table now in Congress.
For now, we will leave it there. James Bamford, Steven Bradbury, thank you very much.
STEVEN BRADBURY: Thank you.
JAMES BAMFORD: Thank you, Jeff.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/july-dec13/fisa_07-31.html
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