Seymour Hersh: Listening In-"Gov Consultant Told Me..."

[kpete]

Seymour Hersh: Listening In. " A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other."

NATIONAL SECURITY DEPT.
LISTENING IN
Issue of 2006-05-29
Posted 2006-05-22


A few days before the start of the confirmation hearings for General Michael Hayden, who has been nominated by President Bush to be the head of the C.I.A., I spoke to an official of the National Security Agency who recently retired. The official joined the N.S.A. in the mid-nineteen-seventies, soon after contentious congressional hearings that redefined the relationship between national security and the public’s right to privacy. The hearings, which revealed that, among other abuses, the N.S.A. had illegally intercepted telegrams to and from the United States, led to the passage of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to protect citizens from unlawful surveillance. “When I first came in, I heard from all my elders that ‘we’ll never be able to collect intelligence again,’” the former official said. “They’d whine, ‘Why do we have to report to oversight committees?’ ” But, over the next few years, he told me, the agency did find a way to operate within the law. “We built a system that protected national security and left people able to go home at night without worrying whether what they did that day was appropriate or legal.”

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was clear that the intelligence community needed to get more aggressive and improve its performance. The Administration, deciding on a quick fix, returned to the tactic that got intelligence agencies in trouble thirty years ago: intercepting large numbers of electronic communications made by Americans. The N.S.A.’s carefully constructed rules were set aside.

.............................

The N.S.A. also programmed computers to map the connections between telephone numbers in the United States and suspect numbers abroad, sometimes focussing on a geographic area, rather than on a specific person—for example, a region of Pakistan. Such calls often triggered a process, known as “chaining,” in which subsequent calls to and from the American number were monitored and linked. The way it worked, one high-level Bush Administration intelligence official told me, was for the agency “to take the first number out to two, three, or more levels of separation, and see if one of them comes back”—if, say, someone down the chain was also calling the original, suspect number. As the chain grew longer, more and more Americans inevitably were drawn in.

............................

Instead, the N.S.A. began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other. “In the old days, you needed probable cause to listen in,” the consultant explained. “But you could not listen in to generate probable cause. What they’re doing is a violation of the spirit of the law.” One C.I.A. officer told me that the Administration, by not approaching the FISA court early on, had made it much harder to go to the court later.

more at:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060529ta_talk_hersh

[Democrat 4 Ever]

1. If Sy Hersh says it than it is the gospel. Period. That man has a

track record that the rest of the MSM hacks would kill for - except they don't want to do the work it requires to do real reporting. It is much easier to just call up Rove and see what the official line is and write it down.

Hersh's contacts are wide, vast, deep and pure gold. Wonder when Atty General Gonzo will decide to arrest and file charges against him?

Can't wait to read the entire article

[boobooday]

2. Of course it's true

This administration has abused every bit of power that they inherited, and then invented some new, unconsitutional powers as well, and proceeded to abuse them.

There's no doubt that what Sy says is true.

[rodeodance]

3. he is right--How to use it (collected data) is the question that scares me

.Hayden’s public confirmation hearing last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee was unlike the tough-minded House and Senate investigations of three decades ago, and added little to what is known about the wiretap program. One unexamined issue was the effectiveness of the N.S.A. program. “The vast majority of what we did with the intelligence was ill-focussed and not productive,” a Pentagon consultant told me. “It’s intelligence in real time, but you have to know where you’re looking and what you’re after.”

On May 11th, President Bush, responding to the USA Today story, said, “If Al Qaeda or their associates are making calls into the United States, or out of the United States, we want to know what they are saying.” That is valid, and a well-conceived, properly supervised intercept program would be an important asset. “Nobody disputes the value of the tool,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “It’s the unresolved tension between the operators saying, ‘Here’s what we can build,’ and the legal people saying, ‘Just because you can build it doesn’t mean you can use it.’ ” It’s a tension that the President and his advisers have not even begun to come to terms with.

[habitual]

4. Seymour Hersh fights back.

Monitor his calls all you want. Scary that we KNOW that any journalist that is a critic is easily labelled a threat and surely he is being monitored now. This man seems like he is still willing to fight and that must piss them off so much.

[AnarchoFreeThinker]

5. Let's build a massive spy program to track calls by all but the 1 guy who

is going to call this country on his cell. Unless, that is, he really really wants to be caught.

[sofa king]

6. Sy Hersh can be "proven" correct mathematically.

"A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other." --Seymour Hersh

Well, I don't know this for certain, since I'm so terrible with all things mathematic. That's why I put the variation of the word "proof" in quotes. I'd better just get to what I mean before I look even sillier.

Okay, we have verification of Sy's story in the form of this article and the dozens of others like it. In typical Bush fashion, the FBI admitted to the icecube on the surface which belies the berg lumbering underneath. They confirm pulling records on 3,501 people last year, including phone records.

Let's say those phone records were for an entire year and that in that year each of those 3,501 called 24 different people. That means that 84,024 different names were recorded in those investigations. Does recording a name in association with a "suspect" (if such a term can be used) constitute monitoring? I think it does.

But what if The Man takes it one step further than that, as Hersh suggests, by "chaining" those 84,024 people to see who each of them called? Let's use the same figure of 24 new and different people called in that same year. That's 2,016,576 names recorded.

Take it one step beyond that and you exceed 48 million people's names recorded, or just slightly more than the number of people who voted for Democratic Senatorial candidates in the 2004 elections.

Just one more step beyond that approaches the equivalent population of China, and exceeds the total population of the United States by several times.

If phone call data was already handed over to the federal government by your friendly phone companies, compiling these associations would still be a monumental task: it would likely take minutes of computer time, rather than mere nanoseconds.

[lyonn]

7. There are so few reporters in the Sy Hersh mode

We are grateful that there are people in the know that will give him their side of what is happening with this govt. Moyer, Robert Parry, Molly Ivans, and thank goodness others that their names escape me now but they do keep the pot boiling for those damn war and power mongers.

[librechik]

8. apparently no one in the NSA has heard of the "probable cause" provision

I heard another idiot, George Terwilliger, insist the standard was "reasonable" this morning. Is this the new talking point? The un-reality community re-wrote the fourth amendment so the proable cause bit is removed? That's what it seems like.