Illegal Wiretapping … Still; Bill Clinton’s Email Accessed
Lichtblau and Risen are back with what feels like a quarterly update reporting that Americans are still being illegally surveilled.
Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.
Both the former analyst’s account and the rising concern among some members of Congress about the N.S.A.’s recent operation are raising fresh questions about the spy agency.
[snip]
He said he and other analysts were trained to use a secret database, code-named Pinwale, in 2005 that archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages. He said Pinwale allowed N.S.A. analysts to read large volumes of e-mail messages to and from Americans as long as they fell within certain limits — no more than 30 percent of any database search, he recalled being told — and Americans were not explicitly singled out in the searches.
The former analyst added that his instructors had warned against committing any abuses, telling his class that another analyst had been investigated because he had improperly accessed the personal e-mail of former President Bill Clinton.
These reports feel so familiar. What is new, though, is that people like Rush Holt (who was quoted extensively in the article) are getting pissed enough that they’re giving more details about the abuses in the program.
Good! I’m glad somebody besides me is getting pissed.
Last paragraph: What is new, though, that that
Thank you Lindy
What happened to Bmaz’s article on Holder? I was starting to read it and it got scrubbed?
It will post later, sorry about that.
…one of those moments you wished you had a photographic memory.
Calm down. If you’re not a terrorist, you have nothing to fear.
Besides, look over there, Letterman is making another apology…
Funny — just about every paragraph of the Risen and Lichtblau had me wondering where Captain Renault might be.
The immediate problem is cultural: for years, and for many through most or all their careers, collectors and analysts have been trained and conditioned to a permissive interpretation of the rules that apply to initial screening, such that every person on this blog, or any other that discusses security, foreign policy, the constitution, current events, etc., ends up having their emails and posts set aside for monitoring.
[The larger problem lies entirely in the combined effects of institutional resilience and political timidity: all the things we’ve discussed so much as having their origins in mission creep decades before Bush II, then given full reign under him — bigger, denser dragnets; increasingly liberal and readily-manipulated initial screening procedures; opaque and underchallenged conceptions about the 4th amendment; the nearly inconceivably difficult logistical complications involved in coordinating tens of thousands of government employees within the bureaucracies of dozens of agencies with hundreds of private corporations to whom so much of the work has been let out in contracts extending over multi-years, and with each other; you know: the stuff that would allow Bamford to crank out a book a month granting time and market — yields vast ‘product’, ballast to the overriding caution that one should defer dismantling any part of it unless-and-until a better mousetrap is found and fully tested. Such supposedly-better mousetraps are derived and invented constantly, put into use in the guise of being tested, for months and years until coming to the point where effectively they form part of the sausage-making apparatus; tolerated by administrations for which they are not a priority, and formally institutionalized by administrations for which are.]
Not to parrot Chuck Grassley or anything, but when you are a governmental surveillance hammer, everything looks like a nail. Intrusion should be minimal, not maximal. Slippery slope and all that silly criminal defense rot you know (people used to laugh at me in the 80s when I would speak of such things).
Well, ya know, the 4th Amd only prohibits the unreasonable searches and seizures, so…
Heh, exactly.
Let’s think about that for a second. Not you, or me, or some other nondescript American, but Bill Freaking Clinton. How restrained and limited is your program when you are collecting up Bill Clinton’s personal email?? Seriously, this is fucking ludicrous. We have long suspected this, but seeing it in print is still rather shocking.
Now, take a further look. This guy on Clinton’s emails was not a collector, he was an “analyst”. After the fact. Which means that not only were they collecting up Clinton’s personal email inappropriately and illegally, they were storing it in a massive inappropriate database. This puts the lie to not only their claims of good faith efforts at narrow collection, but destroys their claims of prompt and proper minimization of that which is “inadvertently collected”. It is all a lie (as if we didn’t know that).
Seems to me that the NSA probably has on file all the White House emails that supposedly have gone down the rabbit hole.
So what are the chances that Bill would be willing to sue?
Unfortunately, probably pretty slim now that he doesn’t wear the pants in the family.
On the bright side, I am fairly certain Vaughn Walker is an avid reader of Lichtblau and Risen.
Great comment. As you say, rather than purging inadvertently collected material from the database, the pathetic “minimization” consists of weak after the fact controls on access to the stuff stored permanently in the database.
Furthermore, the underlying assumption is that plotters will use email to communicate. Since it doesn’t take much sophistication to figure out other ways to communicate on the Internet, this program is only useful for catching the dumbest, most clueless threats, and snooping on people. Mainly snooping on people.
Various government agencies have been eager to snoop on people’s email going back more than 10 years (see Carnivore (software) in Wikipedia and Carnivore Details Emerge, SecurityFocus 2000-10-04 on history going back to 1997).
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been tracking these issues since it was formed in 1990. Its founders were prescient; they knew what was coming.
What about Karl Rove’s servers that captured White House e-mails (and Iowa election results)? I just want to know that the NSA sucked up those too, and hope that the ACLU can retrieve them.
There was a story in Time Magazine last year ( http://www.time.com/time/natio…..91,00.html ) about the Siegelman case that had a link to PDFs of some Leura Canary e-mails. The funny one: On page 2 of the PDF set ( http://www.time.com/time/pdf/e….._to_ag.pdf ), Canary forwards to her henchmen an e-mail sent her by Siegelman and writes:
Which makes me wonder if Siegelman’s (and/or Canary’s?) e-mails were trapped somehow — catch and release — by Rove? the NSA? It’s funny to think that they could be caught in their own net.
This also captured my attention:
Have there been this many whistleblowers previously? Would these be represent new sources for Risen and Lichtblau? Also, I presume that these officials are still in their positions, as they are not described as “former intelligence officials” or some variant.
Yeah, that’s a bit I didn’t include for fair use reasons. 8/10 is pretty damn big to be claiming this is accidental.
I do think they’ve gotten new sources, particularly that analyst. Though I’m not sure these guys had worked with the analysts who James Bamford worked with in his most recent book.
In any case, that’s sort of what I meant by the willingness of people like Holt to discuss this openly.
In plenty of time for EFF to tweak its telecom suit to sue for post January 2007 wiretapping, too.
Three anonymous current intelligence officials…. Working alone, or together? Either way, that is quite remarkable and could represent a significant breach in the dike.
It also makes me think of Arlo, his friend Alice, and her restaurant:
Which begs a question. If this wiretapping is all for the good of the nation and our security according to all the devil’s apprentices, are we listening to Cheney, Rove, etc., etc.?
Certaunly legal permission from the FISA court could be received for wiretapping Cheeney…but then the Cheney leftovers would know.
EW: It is ironic but not unexpected IMO that Bill Clinton’s e-mail was accessed by the NSA. Back when the Republicans and chief moralizer Ken Starr tried to have WJC impeached for a consensual — albeit inappropriate — BJ, they ran roughshod over the Constitution. My concern then, which appears to have been justified, was that if a Special Prosecutor was willing to spend around $50 million to learn about the President’s sexual predilections, than it could easily happen to someone considerably less powerful than WJC like you or I.
Seems that everyone has wanted to eavesdrop on Bill!
A couple of old links from Accuracy In Media:
Did The Chinese Tap Clinton’s Phones? October 7, 1998
Did The FBI Tap Clinton’s Phones? October 20, 1998