Posted by Orin Kerr:
Is ABC News Confused Over Scope of NSA Program?:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_10_05-2008_10_11.shtml#1223611757
ABC News has -- or at least tries to have --[1] a big gotcha on the
Bush Adminsitration about NSA surveillance:
Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American
intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens
overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and
family back home, according to two former military intercept
operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA)
center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.
Intercept operators allege the NSA is listening to citizens'
phone calls.
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay
Rockefeller (D-WV), called the allegations "extremely disturbing"
and said the committee has begun its own examination. . . .
"These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who
happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and
happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said
Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist
assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at
Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.
In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen. Michael
Hayden, now director of the CIA, said private conversations of
Americans are not intercepted. . . .
Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of
intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed
around, a US intelligence official said "all employees of the US
government" should expect that their telephone conversations could
be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and
"information assurance."
;This is a noteworthy story. Among other things, how often do NSA
analysts talk about their work?!? But it seems incorrect to say that
this story suggests that Bush and the intelligence heads were lying
about the Terrorist Surveillance Program. The problem is that this is
pretty clearly a different monitoring program than the TSP program the
New York Times first reported on in 2005. TSP was controversial
largely because the government appeared to be violating FISA: It
violated FISA because the NSA was collecting information inside the
U.S. through U.S. switches. But this program appears to be based on
satellite monitoring of satellite calls from the Middle East, which
FISA did not attempt to regulate until the latest FISA Amendments Act
of 2008. So while it's still an important story, the link to the TSP
strikes me as really weak.
References
1. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=5987804&page=1
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