Oregon Senator Ron Wyden:
The fact of the matter is that Americans’ phone records can reveal a lot of private information. If you know, for example, that somebody called a psychiatrist three times in a week and twice after midnight, you know a lot about that person. And if you’re vacuuming up information on whom Americans call, when they call and how long they talk, you are collecting an astounding amount of information about a huge number of law-abiding Americans. The intelligence agencies try to emphasize that they have rules about who can look at these bulk phone records and when. But, Mr. President, I want to emphasize this, because I think after all of the talking on cable and the talking heads on TV, I want to emphasize: None of these rules require the NSA to go back to a court to look at Americans’ phone records, and none of these rules erase the privacy impact of scooping up all of these records in the first place.
On top of that, as I indicated at the beginning, there have been a number of serious violations of those rules. For the senators who got the letter last Friday, you know that. I want to tell all the other senators on both sides of the aisle that the violations that I touched on tonight were more serious, a lot more serious, than the public has been told. I believe the American people deserve to know more details about these violations that were described last Friday by Director Clapper. Mr. President, I’m going to keep pressing to make more of those details public. And, Mr. President, it’s my view that the information about the details, the violations of the court orders with respect to the bulk phone record collection program, the admission that the court orders had been violated has not been, I think, fully fleshed out by the intelligence community, and I think considerable amount of additional information can be offered without in any way compromising our national security.
I have seen no evidence—none—that this dragnet phone records program has provided any actual unique value for the American people. In every instance in which the NSA has searched through these bulk phone records, it had enough evidence to get a court order for the information it was searching for. And getting a few hundred additional court orders every year would clearly not overwhelm the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The intelligence agencies may argue that collecting Americans’ phone records in bulk is more convenient than getting individual court orders, but convenience alone does not justify the massive intrusion on the privacy of ordinary Americans. I believe it’s vitally important to protect the safety and the liberty of our people. I don’t see any evidence that this program helps protect either. That ought to be the standard of any domestic surveillance program. If the bulk collection program doesn’t protect privacy or security, then it ought to end, plain and simple. The executive branch simply hasn’t shown anything close to an adequate justification for this magnet—massive dragnet surveillance that has compromised the civil liberties of millions of Americans.
James Bamford talking:
you have all this discussion here about 54 plots. The one plot that they actually have discussed was this subway plot in New York where the information actually came from the British. They were the first ones to come up with the information, not the NSA. And the other one was this case where somebody in San Diego was detected sending $8,000 to a group in Somalia. I mean, that’s their big—their big cases here? So, this is useless surveillance, and—but you can tell how Congress eventually approves this by peeling away all these layers of deception that goes into the presentations.
In 2011, I was working for Wired magazine, and I got a call from Wyden’s office saying he wanted to talk to me ahead of the vote on the PATRIOT Act. Wyden called me in his office. We talked. And he said that, in secret, the executive branch was interpreting the PATRIOT Act in a way that, if the public knew about it, would astonish it, that the collection that it believed it had the power to perform amounted to essentially a revision of the PATRIOT Act entirely in secret. And I asked Wyden, “What do you mean by that? What’s actually happening?” And he said he couldn’t at all tell me any detail at all, because all of it is classified. Even the interpretation of the law in secret is classified. And he had fought a battle to even say publicly that such a thing had even happened. And for two years, Wyden had sort of coughed and hinted and nudged people to pay attention in some way to the fact that this was even happening. He gave it the term “secret law.”
I had been covering this for the past two years, and I had no idea what Wyden actually meant, until Edward Snowden disclosed to my newspaper this overwhelming bulk collection. Ron Wyden was entirely vindicated, and it sort of underscores that when Wyden says to his colleagues, “Hey, maybe look in secret about the discrepancy between what the NSA is saying its violations have been—meaning accidental—and what it actually said to us in secret. Maybe that kind of should get some more attention. Maybe more senators should go back into closed session,” he’s saying, “and look at that,” because Wyden’s track record really does bear out here. And it also points out, now that Chris Inglis has said it in public, that if Wyden is saying the bulk phone records collection hasn’t actually stopped terrorist attacks, well, Wyden’s track record of describing this stuff vaguely in public is pretty good.
Senator Dianne Feinstein brings up 9/11. You know, the U.S. government had all the information it needed to prevent 9/11. It didn’t need all these bulk data collections and everything else. All it needed to do was have the CIA tell the FBI or the State Department that these two people were coming to the United States—Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi—because they knew it. They knew it because they had copies of their visas that had been sent to them. And they knew that they were coming to the United States. The problem here wasn’t collecting information; the problem was distributing information. So, justifying all this based on 9/11 is just total nonsense.
we’ve had this going on for seven years, this internal domestic metadata telephone collection and, up until 2011, the email collection also. And yet, we’ve had—after 9/11, we had the—we had the underwear bomber, the person that was flying to Detroit that was going to blow up a plane Christmas Day, the Times Square bomber, the two people in Boston that just committed the bombing on the marathon day, and so forth. Now, all those people were communicating internationally, basically. They were all communicating either to Chechnya, or the Times Square bomber was communicating to Pakistan, and the underwear bomber was in Yemen and communicating with other countries in the Middle East and also to Nigeria, for example. So if the NSA had been taking all this attention and paying attention to foreign communications and international communications instead of domestic communications, it might have discovered those. But to have a track record where you’re not able to discover those, because you’ve got too much electronic hay on the electronic haystack and—impossible to find that little needle.
In 1975 Senator Frank Church said, “That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. … I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” Those, the words of the late Senator Frank Church in 1975, who convened the Church Committee hearings to challenge this level of total surveillance.
— source democracynow.org
James Bamford, investigative reporter who has covered the National Security Agency for the last three decades and helped expose the NSA’s existence in the 1980s. His most recent book on the agency is The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. His most recent piece is for The New York Review of Books, titled “They Know Much More Than You Think.”