Pentagon watchdog admits he had no clue about massive NSA phone data collection
19 March 2014, 15:11 -- The Pentagon's surveillance watchdog in charge of overseeing the National Security Agency's efforts and making sure that they're within the law said he had no idea about massive phone data collection until it hit the headlines. Furthermore, he said his office isn't currently, nor does it have any plans to investigate the agency's surveillance policies.
'From my own personal knowledge, those programs, in and of themselves, I was not personally aware,' said Anthony Thomas, the deputy Defense Department inspector general for intelligence, who has oversight on the NSA, The Guardian reported Tuesday.
Thomas said that his office, for now, has deferred to the NSA's inspector general the job of looking into the spy agency's dragnet.
'If the NSA IG is looking into something and we feel that their reporting, their investigation is ongoing, we'll wait to see what they find or what they don't find, and that may dictate something that we may do,' he said.
'In the course of a planning process, we may get a hotline [call], or we may get some complaint that may dictate an action that we may or not take.'
Thomas said that if NSA secrets leaker Edward Snowden had only contacted the DOD's surveillance IG hotline, 'there would have been a robust look at his allegations,' the newspaper reported.
The Guardian noted that Thomas's acknowledgment that he was unaware of the bulk phone data collection comes despite months of assurances that the NSA's surveillance activities are thoroughly overseen.
In an October appearance before the House Intelligence Committee, outgoing NSA director Keith Alexander talked about multi-layered oversight, the Guardian reported.
'The [director of national intelligence] has an inspector general and a general counsel that also oversees what we're doing,' he told the committee then, the newspaper reported.
'The Department of Defense has a general counsel and an inspector general that oversees what we're doing. And the Department of Justice, their national security division, oversees what we're doing and works with us in the court and the White House.'
Shortly after Thomas' comments at the Pentagon, the Washington Post – citing Snowden documents – wrote that the US-administered surveillance program MYSTIC is capable of recording '100 percent' of the contents of each and every phone call in a foreign country.
MYSTIC and its 'retrospective retrieval' tool known as RETRO can store 'billions' of phone discussions for 30 days, and the oldest conversations are purged as new ones are logged. Once the content enters the NSA's system, however, analysts are able to go back and listen in as much as a month later to find information on a person who might never have been suspected of a crime at the time that their initial conversation was collected, unbeknownst to them, by the US government.
NSA records, stores all foreign countries' telephone calls for 30 days
The US National Security Agency has created a surveillance system that allows it to record and review other countries' telephone calls. Then, the information is stored up to 30 days. This data is provided by the documents, disclosed by the NSA former contractor Edward Snowden.
The program is called MYSTIC and it was launched in 2009. Its RETRO tool reached its full capacity against the first target country in 2011. The system gathers 'every single' telephone call nationwide and stores it in a 30-day rolling buffer. The oldest call is then replaced by the newest one. This allows specialists to retrieve necessary audio, analyze it and send its fragment for a long-term storage.
No other NSA program disclosed to date has swallowed a nation's telephone network whole. In his January speech President Obama claimed that this bulk method of capturing data flows doesn't use discriminants. Thus, most of the collected information is irrelevant for the US. In fact, the capability of the method is highly valuable.
Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said that this is a necessary method of providing the national security. 'New or emerging threats are often hidden within the large and complex system of modern global communications, and the United States must consequently collect signals intelligence in bulk in certain circumstances in order to identify these threats,' she said.
The documents, provided by Snowden say that the program may be extended to other countries, if it hasn't been already. Last year's secret intelligence budget showed more countries for which the MYSTIC system provides 'comprehensive metadata access and content.'
The program gathers data of those Americans, who live in the target countries as well. The fact denies Obama's statement 'that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don't threaten our national security,' regardless of nationality, 'and that we take their privacy concerns into account.'
President Obama instructed the NSA and other agencies that bulk acquisition may be used only to gather information on one of six specified threats, including nuclear proliferation and terrorism. The directive, however, also noted that limits on bulk collection 'do not apply to signals intelligence data that is temporarily acquired to facilitate targeted collection.'
In order 'to cope with the vast increases in digital data that have accompanied the rise of the global network' the US has build a new repository in Utah. Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, thinks that in the upcoming years the NSA will retain data longer.
NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines assures that MYSTIC is strictly conducted under Executive Order 12333, the traditional grant of presidential authority to intelligence agencies for operations outside the United States.
Some legislators are now considering whether Congress should draft new laws to govern intelligence operations. Experts agree with them, saying that there is not much legislation that governs overseas intelligence work.
Beginning in 2007, Congress loosened 40-year-old restrictions on domestic surveillance because so much foreign data crossed US territory. There were no comparable changes to protect the privacy of US citizens and residents whose calls and e-mails now routinely cross international borders.
Voice of Russia, The Washington Post, The Guardian
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