SAN FRANCISCO, June 10: Recent revelations about the U.S. National Security Agency’s expansive data-collection efforts have underscored the power of electronic surveillance in the Internet era and renewed an historic debate over how far the government should go in spying on its own people.
A disillusioned former CIA computer technician named Edward Snowden, who had worked as a contactor at the NSA, identified himself yesterday as the source of multiple disclosures on the government’s surveillance that were published by the Guardian and the Washington Post last week.
The information included a secret court order directing Verizon Communications Inc to turn over all its calling records for a three-month period, and details about an NSA program code-named PRISM, which collected emails, chat logs and other types of data from Internet companies. These included Google Inc, Facebook Inc, Microsoft Corp , Yahoo Inc, AOL Inc and Apple Inc .
Snowden cast himself as a whistleblower alarmed about overreaching by the US intelligence establishment, which was given broad powers after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 and can take now take advantage of the huge growth in digital data.
President Barack Obama and congressional leaders have vigorously defended the NSA’s efforts as both legal and necessary. US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper took the rare step of responding in detail to stories about PRISM.
US Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department has launched a new round of investigations into media leaks, the very issue that consumed his department for the last month and led to renewed calls for Holder’s resignation.
Intelligence officials and the technology companies say PRISM is much less invasive than initially suggested by stories in the Guardian and the Post. Several people familiar with negotiations between the Silicon Valley giants and intelligence officials said the NSA could not rummage at will through company servers and that requests for data had to be about specific accounts believed to be overseas.
Still, the revelations alarmed civil liberties advocates and some lawmakers who had supported the Patriot Act, which gave intelligence agencies new powers after 9/11, and another law granting telecommunication carriers immunity for evesdropping at the request of the government.
“This is the law, but the way the law is being interpreted has really concerned me,” Democratic Senator Mark Udall said on ABC yesterday. “It’s just to me a violation of our privacy, particularly if it’s done in ways that we don’t know about.”
Of primary concern for Udall and others was that millions of Americans have had their phone habits and other records perused by computer programs and analysts hunting for connections to terrorists or foreign governments – even though the NSA is generally barred from spying on US citizens.
One former high-ranking NSA official told Reuters that such broad assembly of records was essential to investigations.
If “a known terrorist in Yemen calls someone in the US, why did he call them and what happened when the person in US starts making calls elsewhere in the US?” he asked. “On the surface it looks like the emergence of a terrorism cell.”
Data-mining programs map such connections and provide grounds for further inquiry, potentially including the contents of calls, according to former operatives and Justice Department officials.
Among the remaining unknowns, even after four days of media coverage, is how much data beyond phone numbers is collected from US residents, how that data is “minimized” to prevent excess scrutiny, how it is analyzed and how long it is kept.
The NSA “keeps the emails essentially forever. I don’t think there is any question about it,” said Mark Rossini, a former FBI supervisor who was assigned to a CIA counter-terrorism unit and who said he was briefed on PRISM.
“They are not reading our data, they are storing it in bits and bytes that can be searched,” Rossini said. The same is likely true of the mass of phone calls copied from AT&T Inc offices to facilities controlled by the NSA, as disclosed by an AT&T whistleblower in 2006, he added. (agencies)
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