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[infowar.de] Seymour Hersh über das NSA-Abhörprojekt
A security consultant working with a major telecommunications carrier told
me that his client set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main
computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a
government-intelligence computer center. This link provided direct access
to the carrier’s network core—the critical area of its system, where all
its data are stored. “What the companies are doing is worse than turning
over records,” the consultant said. “They’re providing total access to all
the data.”
-> In der im November 2005 beschlossenen deutschen TKÜV
(http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/64923) ist auch so ein
Remote-Zugriff für die Geheimdienste vorgesehen. Die Schnittstelle muss
sogar so gebaut sein, dass die ISPs es nicht mitkriegen, wenn BND oder
Verfassungsschutz zugreifen.
--> Frage: Warum taucht sowas in der deutschen Presse fast nie auf,
sondern nur bei heise oder quintessenz?
RB
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060529ta_talk_hersh
LISTENING IN
Seymour M. Hersh, New Yorker 22/5/06
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.
Last December, the Times reported that the N.S.A. was listening in on
calls between people in the United States and people in other countries,
and a few weeks ago USA Today reported that the agency was collecting
information on millions of private domestic calls. A security consultant
working with a major telecommunications carrier told me that his client
set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex
and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer
center. This link provided direct access to the carrier’s network core—the
critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. “What the
companies are doing is worse than turning over records,” the consultant
said. “They’re providing total access to all the data.”
“This is not about getting a cardboard box of monthly phone bills in
alphabetical order,” a former senior intelligence official said. The
Administration’s goal after September 11th was to find suspected
terrorists and target them for capture or, in some cases, air strikes.
“The N.S.A. is getting real-time actionable intelligence,” the former
official said.
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.
FISA requires the government to get a warrant from a special court if it
wants to eavesdrop on calls made or received by Americans. (It is
generally legal for the government to wiretap a call if it is purely
foreign.) The legal implications of chaining are less clear. Two people
who worked on the N.S.A. call-tracking program told me they believed that,
in its early stages, it did not violate the law. “We were not listening to
an individual’s conversation,” a defense contractor said. “We were
gathering data on the incidence of calls made to and from his phone by
people associated with him and others.” Similarly, the Administration
intelligence official said that no warrant was needed, because “there’s no
personal identifier involved, other than the metadata from a call being
placed.”
But the point, obviously, was to identify terrorists. “After you hit
something, you have to figure out what to do with it,” the Administration
intelligence official told me. The next step, theoretically, could have
been to get a suspect’s name and go to the fisa court for a warrant to
listen in. One problem, however, was the volume and the ambiguity of the
data that had already been generated. (“There’s too many calls and not
enough judges in the world,” the former senior intelligence official
said.) The agency would also have had to reveal how far it had gone, and
how many Americans were involved. And there was a risk that the court
could shut down the program.
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.
The Administration intelligence official acknowledged that the
implications of the program had not been fully thought out. “There’s a lot
that needs to be looked at,” he said. “We are in a technology age. We need
to tweak fisa, and we need to reconsider how we handle privacy issues.”
Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center, believes that if the White House had gone to Congress
after September 11th and asked for the necessary changes in FISA “it would
have got them.” He told me, “The N.S.A. had a lot of latitude under FISA
to get the data it needed. I think the White House purposefully ignored
the law, because the President did not want to do the monitoring under
FISA. There is a strong commitment inside the intelligence community to
obey the law, and the community is getting dragged into the mud on this.”
General Hayden, who as the head of the N.S.A. supervised the intercept
program, is seen by many as a competent professional who was too quick to
follow orders without asking enough questions. As one senior congressional
staff aide said, “The concern is that the Administration says, ‘We’re
going to do this,’ and he does it—even if he knows better.” Former
Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, who was a member of the 9/11 Commission,
had a harsher assessment. Kerrey criticized Hayden for his suggestion,
after the Times exposé, that the N.S.A.’s wiretap program could have
prevented the attacks of 9/11. “That’s patently false and an indication
that he’s willing to politicize intelligence and use false information to
help the President,” Kerrey said.
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.
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