NSA News Roundup

This weekend was full of NSA spying news.

Early Saturday morning, the government filed its mostly classified argument that the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T for helping the government should be dismissed because it might reveal state secrets.

The filing warns Chief Judge Vaughn Walker, a man known for his libertarian tendencies, that the Kasva decision states "once the the [state secrets] privilege is properly invoked and the court is satisfied that there is a reasonable danger that national security would be harmed by the disclosure of state secrets, the privilege is absolute."

Both the Director of National Intelligence, John Anterooms, and the head of the NSA, Keith Alexander filed declarations (one public and one classified) attesting that the suit could damage national security.

Fellow Wired News contributor Kim Zetter has a very revealing interview in Salon with Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian, who predicts there are more revelations to come and that the weak link in the surveillance programs are corporations.

I'll tell you where this story probably will go next. Notice the USA Today article doesn't mention whether the Internet service providers or cellphone providers or companies operating transatlantic cables like Global Crossing cooperated with the NSA. That's the next round of revelations. The real vulnerabilities for the NSA are the companies. Sooner or later one of these companies, fearing the inevitable lawsuit from the ACLU, is going to admit what it did, and the whole thing is going to come tumbling down. If you want some historical perspective look at Operation Shamrock, which collapsed in 1975 because [Rep.] Bella Abzug [D-NY] subpoenaed the heads of Western Union and the other telecommunications giants and put them in witness chairs, and they all admitted that they had cooperated with the NSA for the better part of 40 years by supplying cables and telegrams.

Eric Lichtblau, the New York Times journalist who co-authored the December story that the NSA was wiretapping some Americans without going to the FISA court, revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney was the driving force behind the NSA's expansion into domestic eavesdropping.† The story portrays former NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden, now nominated to lead the CIA, as the legally cautious participant in the expansion of surveillance post-9/11.

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.[...]

By several accounts, including those of the two officials, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks.

On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress.

On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970's and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans.

And finally, the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard's resident defender of torture and totalitarian surveillance architectures, Susan Mac Donald chimes in with a factually challenged jeremiad against anyone who has concerns about the recent spying revelations.

In fact she argues that privacy is protected BECAUSE the data dump from telcos to the government is so large.

Your phone company at the very least--if not a score of marketers--knows your calling history; that history is no longer private, therefore, and the government can obtain your phone records without a judicial warrant. Congress has provided statutory protections for certain kinds of telecommunications information, but those statutes allow telephone companies to share their data with the government for emergencies. After 9/11, a phone executive who didn't believe that the country was in danger of another catastrophic attack was seriously out of touch with reality. And the volume of data requested almost by definition protects the privacy of any individual customer. [...]

The time to explain how data mining protects privacy while providing a crucial tool against unknown mass-murderers was while the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program was under attack. That program, which hoped to uncover patterns of terrorist activity in publicly available commercial data, was merely in its preliminary research stages, but the Senate killed it in a demagogic display of privacy hysteria.

Privacy advocates should be thankful for Susan Mac Donald, if she didn't exist, they'd have to invent an opponent with unflagging belief in state power and the omniscience of technology.