Remember Bolton's use of NSA intercepts?

[Oilwellian]

The revelation that the National Security Agency was allowed to conduct non-FISA intercepts of American citizens should bring last summer's hearing on John Bolton's nomination to the United Nations back into focus. As Legal times noted in September of this year, "During the confirmation hearings of John Bolton as the U.S. representative to the United Nations, it came to light that the NSA had freely revealed intercepted conversations of U.S. citizens to Bolton while he served at the State Department. . . . More generally, Newsweek reports that from January 2004 to May 2005, the NSA supplied intercepts and names of 10,000 U.S. citizens to policy-makers at many departments, other U.S. intelligence services, and law enforcement agencies."

We still don't know who he was looking at and what information was contained in those intercepts. More importantly, were they legally obtained? In light of the latest revelation, we have another possible explanation why the Bush Administration fought so strenuously to keep those intercepts secret and out of the hearing. Snooping without judicial review is wrong and must be punished.

http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/12/16/142620/20

[Angry Girl]

1. "Snooping without judicial review is wrong and must be punished."

Oh, yeah!

[Burried News]

2. Yowza Yowza Yowza - the Vorpal Sword of Justice will have its

snicker snack and then some before this is over.

[DBoon]

3. The NSA is scary, scary, scary

They have incredible capabilities to intercept, decrypt, and analyze almost every from of communication.

Check out James Banford's "The Puzzle Palace" for more:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140067485/qid=1134764836/sr=8-2/ref=pd_bbs_2/102-2406502-2244947?n=507846&s=books&v=glance

[Al-CIAda]

6. 10x's the budget of the CIA -at least that is what they tell us...

which means its probabily more.

[BrotherBuzz]

9. NSA doesn't spy on us unless we trip the filter

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That ought to do it. Bite me NSA!

[jmowreader]

12. Or better yet, DON'T check out that book

He was wrong on about half of everything he said. This was told to me by Genuine NSA Spooks.

OTOH, he got enough things right that if you take a copy of it into a secure area, you can't take it back out again. IIRC the 311th MI's secure area has twelve copies of it--all from the Fort Campbell post library. The copy they have now has "not to be checked out to a member of the 311th MI" inside the front cover.

The best book ever written about SIGINT is Philip Yardley's "The American Black Chamber." Yardley ran the Black Chamber (MI-8), which was located in New York City and was tasked with breaking diplomatic ciphers--the very best, most secure codes the country could make. The secretary of state at the time, Henry Stimson, closed his operation...and to maintain the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed, he wrote a tell-all book about his operation. He got rich, but he never ate lunch in this town again.

[Sydnie]

19. Another example from my local paper today about Not Checking Out

a book! Doesn't matter that he needed the book for a class ...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5620250&mesg_id=5620250

[DBoon]

20. So is there anything that is unclassified that is any better?

If you know of anything, please post.

If not, then Bamford's books stand.

[Liberal In Texas]

21. Also read Bamford's newer book, Body Of Secrets.

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/bamford/author.html

As for the Puzzle Palace; In fact, the government ended up using The Puzzle Palace as a textbook in its Defense Intelligence College.

I think the stories about the inaccuracies in The Puzzle Palace were probably disinformation.

[eppur_se_muova]

14. The technology is a useful tool. It's how govt might use it that is scary.

"Puzzle Pallace" dates from 1982. Bamford has a more recent book, "Body of Secrets" (2002, this ed.) on the NSA

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385499086/ref=pd_sim_b_1/104-1327523-4550306?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155

I'm going to have to stop posting links to Amazon.com. Their pages are so cluttered with extraneous junk it's getting hard to find the useful info.

edit to correct pub'n dates; still not sure if 2002 is correct for this ed

[3waygeek]

17. Not only that

but thanks to the little gray men, they're about 200 years ahead of the rest of the world technologically. :tinfoilhat:

[ThomWV]

4. Here's How That Worked - As I Recall

I'm no lawyer - but this is how I remember that having worked out.

NSA could listen in on foreigners - which they do all the time. They had tape (my own generic term) of someone they were legally listening in on talking to Americans - who they were not authorized to monitor as far as we knew. So they could have the tapes of foreigners talking to Americans but they were never supposed to disclose who those americans were on the receiving end of the calls. It was that information that Bolton demanded - who were the foreigners talking to in the taped converstations - that was of such controversy.

I could be wrong.

One way or another what we do not now know is who inititated the converstations which were taped by the NSA. One way is fine and dandy, the other way, if approved by the President, is an impeachable offense I believe.

[Oilwellian]

7. When Bush signed the secret EO...

the NSA had the green light to spy on anyone, including American citizens.

[ThomWV]

10. Exceeded Authority Does Not Make An Illegal Act Legal

Doesn't matter much what Bush signed if the act itself was illegal. He can pardon after the fact but he can not authorize the violation of the law beforehand.

[Oilwellian]

5. I hope...

we will learn just who these neocons were spying on. I will bet it was political and had nothing to do with national security.

[leftchick]

18. that would be an excellent bet because...

have these neofreaks done ANYTHING for our real National Security? Hell NO! They have done EVERYTHING to keep us less safe today more than at an other time in history!

[Burried News]

8. Nom and kick

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

11. 70 yard Ray Guy punt

[seafan]

13. More on Bolton's handling of NSA intercepts:

From Newsweek, May 2, 2005

Spying: Giving Out U. S. Names
Mark Hosenball

May 2 issue - The National Security Agency is not supposed to target Americans; when a U.S. citizen's name comes up in an NSA "intercept," the agency routinely minimizes dissemination of the info by masking the name before it distributes the report to other U.S. agencies. But it's now clear the agency disseminates thousands of U.S. names. U.N. ambassador nominee John Bolton told a Senate confirmation hearing he had requested that U.S. names be unmasked from NSA intercepts on a handful of occasions; the State Department said he had made 10 such requests since 2001, and that the department as a whole had made 400 similar requests over the same period. But evidence is emerging that NSA regularly supplies uncensored intercepts, including named Americans, to other agencies far more often than even many top intel officials knew.

According to information obtained by NEWSWEEK, since January 2004 NSA received—and fulfilled—between 3,000 and 3, 500 requests from other agencies to supply the names of U.S. citizens and officials (and citizens of other countries that help NSA eavesdrop around the world, including Britain, Canada and Australia) that initially were deleted from raw intercept reports. Sources say the number of names disclosed by NSA to other agencies during this period is more than 10,000. About one third of such disclosures were made to officials at the policymaking level; most of the rest were disclosed to other intel agencies and, perhaps surprisingly, only a small proportion to law-enforcement agencies. Civil libertarians expressed dismay at the numbers. An official familiar with NSA procedures insisted the agency maintains careful logs of all requests for U.S. names and doles out such info only after agency officials are satisfied "that the requester needs the information necessary to understand the foreign intelligence or assess its importance."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7614681/site/newsweek/print/1/displaymode/1098/



From Newsweek, May 26, 2005
Last-Minute Letter
Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff

Rules and procedures governing NSA, which runs a worldwide network of electronic eavesdropping stations and also breaks foreign governments' secret codes, require that the agency avoid deliberately monitoring the communications of American citizens. But in its routine monitoring of millions of international messages—telephone calls, faxes, e-mails, radio transmissions—American names are often inadvertently picked up. In that event, the NSA routinely masks the American names before forwarding the intercepts to intelligence "consumers" in other agencies. However, officials in other agencies who receive the intercepts can ask the NSA to "un-minimize" the names of Americans mentioned if such officials certify to the NSA—in writing—that they need the American names in order to "understand the foreign intelligence."

During Bolton’s testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee several weeks ago, Sen. Chris Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who is one of Bolton's fiercest congressional critics, caused a minor sensation when he asked Bolton whether he had ever asked the NSA to supply the names of American officials mentioned in intelligence intercepts. Bolton told the committee he did so on a couple of occasions.
Later, the State Department sent Dodd a letter disclosing that Bolton had in recent years requested that the NSA unmask American names in 10 raw-intercept reports. The State Department as a whole had requested similar information from the NSA nearly 500 times since May 2001. In this context, Bolton supporters argued, Bolton's 10 requests for unedited NSA intercepts were statistically insignificant.

snip

In an apparent response to congressional pressure, Gen. Michael Hayden, NSA's outgoing director, who is now principal deputy to John Negroponte, the administration's new intelligence czar, subsequently gave a top-secret briefing to Rockefeller and the Intelligence Committee's GOP chairman, Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, about Bolton's dealings with the NSA. In this briefing, according to Rockefeller's letter to the Foreign Relations Committee, Hayden allowed Rockefeller and Roberts to review the NSA intercept reports at the center of the Bolton controversy. However, according to Rockefeller, Hayden did not share with Rockefeller and Roberts the names of the Americans that the NSA had provided to Bolton. In all, Rockefeller said, Bolton's requests for 10 uncensored NSA reports would have involved the unmasking of the identities of "nineteen U.S. persons."

snip

According to Rockefeller, in an interview with Intelligence Committee officials, Bolton's acting chief of staff, CIA analyst Frederick Fleitz, said that on at least one occasion Bolton allegedly shared the "unminimized identity information he received from the NSA" with another State Department official. Fleitz told the committee that Bolton "used the information he was provided ... in order to seek out the State Department official mentioned in the report to congratulate him." According to a congressional investigator working with Bolton critics, the substance of the NSA intercept report included a discussion between two foreigners who were discussing how an American official—presumably the one Bolton congratulated—had given them a hard time.

snip

(more details in article)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7983335/site/newsweek/page/3/print/1/displaymode/1098/


I think this is why the administration fought so hard to keep secret just who Bolton was requesting secret information on. If these requested documents had been released to Bolton's UN confirmation hearings, we would have known much earlier that Americans were under unauthorized, illegal and unconstitutional surveillance.

So, what happened? Bolton's UN confirmation was shot down. And when Congress went on a forthcoming break, Bush issued an executive appointment of Bolton to the UN ambassadorship.

And here we are today.

[Oilwellian]

15. And here you have it....

Sources say the number of names disclosed by NSA to other agencies during this period is more than 10,000. About one third of such disclosures were made to officials at the policymaking level; most of the rest were disclosed to other intel agencies and, perhaps surprisingly, only a small proportion to law-enforcement agencies.

If indeed they were spying on Americans for the sake of national security, you'd think the majority of these names would be given to law-enforcement agencies. And just who are these officialS?

[seafan]

16. Wonder if any of our officials are curious if they are those *officials*?

The cat is out of the bag now, George.