In April, then-NSA Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden assured the Senate Intelligence Committee that the NSA is "the most aggressive agency in the intelligence community when it comes to protecting privacy." Hayden, now the deputy director of national intelligence, defended Bush's warrant-less monitoring order during a White House briefing Monday. He was unavailable for further comment, his spokeswoman said. The NSA also declined comment.
But the former top officials said the recently revealed program, which sidestepped a secret court, violated longtime agency practices. Those were established after the revelation of the NSA's earlier abuses in operations code-named Minaret and Shamrock.
After the 1978 law was passed, the NSA issued an internal directive known as U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18, barring agency employees from eavesdropping on Americans in the United States, with few exceptions. NSA employees are required to re-read the document every six months and sign a form stating that they've done so. "As a Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) officer, it is continually drilled into us that the very first law chiseled in the SIGINT equivalent of the Ten Commandments is that `Thou shall not spy on American persons without a court order from FISA,'" said former NSA analyst Russell Tice.
If the NSA inadvertently intercepts the communications of a U.S. citizen or communications that mention a U.S. citizen, they are supposed to be destroyed. There are a handful of exceptions. Intercepts of U.S. citizens that aren't destroyed go into a special database - code-named "Body Surf" - and the real names are masked, available only to a handful of people.
Bush, Hayden and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales have defended the program to eavesdrop on calls without warrants, saying it involves only individuals suspected of associating with terrorist groups, lasts for a short time and is regularly reviewed.
The former officials and experts said that while the revelations so far come nowhere near the abuse of a generation ago, they fear that the public taint will be the same. Former NSA Director Bobby Ray Inman, who helped push through the 1978 FISA law, said he worried that the agency is being unfairly tarred, with a "huge" impact on morale. "They only act in accordance with law, and an executive order is law," Inman said, referring to the order Bush signed permitting warrant-less domestic surveillance. But he added: "Frankly, my experience over the years is that politicians don't worry about" the impact of their actions on intelligence agencies' morale. "I've talked to a number of people over there since this came out ... and there is none of them that are happy about this and many who are upset," said author James Bamford, whose book "Puzzle Palace" was the first in-depth look at the NSA.
This is not reassuring. Again, it's up to each human operator to respect the privacy of the communication reviewed. And then certain types of messages are kept. In other words, the NSA has been violating the specific requirements of the law for a long time, only covering itself procedurally. I presume the "Body Surf" database is reviewed extensively and warrents may have been obtained after the fact prior to Bush, but now even the procedural protections have broken down.
I'm quite ambivalent with this program in general. Why should the US be able to review all overseas calls anyway? While I like the idea of the kinds of information that has been obtained to protect us, I don't like the precedence. We now see how the technology has crept into illegal territory in a way that many people just shrug their shoulders while our rights to privacy and freedom of speech are curtailed.
Hat tip to The Left Coaster. Mary's comments about the impact on NSA staff are well taken. But I think this sort of stress comes with the turf.
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