The program of secret government eavesdropping on phone calls and e-mails by the National Security Agency is much broader than President Bush acknowledged last week, and included the cooperation of major telecommunications companies as part of a vast "data-mining" operation. While the president downplayed the flap over the program during his final press conference of the year on December 19 — citing it as a vital tool in the war against terror — congressional officials said they are even more determined to investigate the scope of the matter.
According to an earlier New York Times report, since the beginning of the secret program launched in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the NSA has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States in a hunt for evidence of terrorist activity.
In a follow-up story, the Times reported Sunday that the amount of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks — all done without court-approved warrants — is much larger than the White House has acknowledged. And some of it was collected by tapping directly into some of the U.S. telecommunication system's main arteries using the cooperation of a handful of large, though unnamed, telecommunications companies, sources told the paper.
As part of the NSA program, the secret agency reportedly gained the cooperation of the companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications. In acknowledging the wiretaps, President Bush had said only that those suspected of terrorist ties were monitored and that the communications monitored either originated from foreign countries or were made to foreign countries (see "President Bush Defends Secret Wiretaps, Urges Patriot Act Renewal").
The collection and analysis of such huge volumes of phone and Internet traffic has raised legal concerns among law enforcement and judicial officials, according to the paper. Some have questioned whether the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — which is typically used to approve warrants for these types of searches, but which was bypassed in the special NSA program — has the legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic "switches."
"There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official told the Times, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."
Officials familiar with the program said the NSA sought the data to look for patterns of who was calling whom and for how long, during what time of day and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Of particular interest were calls to and from Afghanistan. In the cases in which security agency supervisors thought they could show a link to al Qaeda, President Bush authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on the calls without a warrant within the U.S., as long as one end of the phone or e-mail conversation took place outside the country (see "Bush Gave U.S. Agency Authorization To Spy On Americans ").
This kind of "pattern analysis" of calls within the U.S. would often require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom, according to the paper. Two similar programs developed by the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to track terror suspects and screen airline passengers were scrapped after public outcry over possible threats to privacy and civil liberties.
The president said he has re-approved the program more than 30 times since it was launched in 2001. Some officials characterized the program as a large data-mining operation.
In response to the latest revelations about the program, congressional officials said over the weekend that they want to investigate the use of the switches.
"As far as congressional investigations are concerned, these new revelations can only multiply and intensify the growing list of questions and concerns about the warrantless surveillance of Americans," said Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
The Judiciary Committee had already indicated plans to conduct oversight hearings into the president's legal authority to order domestic eavesdropping on terrorism suspects without a warrant before the latest information leaked. But congressional officials said Saturday that they would probably look to expand the review to include a look at the NSA's access to the switches. "We want to look at the entire program, an in-depth review, and this new data-mining issue is certainly a part of the whole picture," a Republican congressional aide who requested anonymity told the Times
"We're seeing an administration that's engaging in a lot of legal hairsplitting to justify behavior that's not authorized by the law," Lisa Graves of the American Civil Liberties Union told the paper. The administration would not comment on the latest reports, saying it would not discuss security issues.
