NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
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.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-listening-to-u.s-phone-calls-without-warrants/
The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified
briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to
domestic phone calls.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week 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.
Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply
to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler's
disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents
of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking
approval.
The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by
Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked
classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video
interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could
from Hawaii "wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal
judge to even the president."
There are serious "constitutional problems" with this approach, said
Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation who has litigated warrantless wiretapping cases. "It
epitomizes the problem of secret laws."
The NSA yesterday declined to comment to CNET. A representative said
Nadler was not immediately available. (This is unrelated to last
week's disclosure that the NSA is currently collecting records of the
metadata of all domestic Verizon calls, but not the actual contents of
the conversations.)
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.
Brewster Kahle, a computer engineer who founded the Internet Archive,
has vast experience storing large amounts of data. He created a
spreadsheet this week estimating that the cost to store all domestic
phone calls a year in cloud storage for data-mining purposes would be
about $27 million per year, not counting the cost of extra security
for a top-secret program and security clearances for the people
involved.
NSA's annual budget is classified but is estimated to be around $10
billion.