Clinton NSA Eavesdropped on U.S. Calls

During the 1990's under President Clinton, the National Security Agency monitored millions of private phone calls placed by U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries under a super secret program code-named Echelon.

On Friday, the New York Times suggested that the Bush administration has instituted "a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices" when it "secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without [obtaining] court-approved warrants."

But in fact, the NSA had been monitoring private telephone conversations on a much larger scale throughout the 1990s - all of it done without a court order, let alone a catalyst like the 9/11 attacks.

In February 2000, for instance, CBS "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft introduced a report on the Clinton-era spy program by noting:

"If you made a phone call today or sent an e-mail to a friend, there's a good chance what you said or wrote was captured and screened by the country's largest intelligence agency. The top-secret Global Surveillance Network is called Echelon, and it's run by the National Security Agency."

NSA computers, said Kroft, "capture virtually every electronic conversation around the world."

Echelon expert Mike Frost, who spent 20 years as a spy for the Canadian equivalent of the National Security Agency, told "60 Minutes" that the agency was monitoring "everything from data transfers to cell phones to portable phones to baby monitors to ATMs."

Mr. Frost detailed activities at one unidentified NSA installation, telling "60 Minutes" that agency operators "can listen in to just about anything" - while Echelon computers screen phone calls for key words that might indicate a terrorist threat.

The "60 Minutes" report also spotlighted Echelon critic, then-Rep. Bob Barr, who complained that the project as it was being implemented under Clinton "engages in the interception of literally millions of communications involving United States citizens."

One Echelon operator working in Britain told "60 Minutes" that the NSA had even monitored and tape recorded the conversations of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond.

Still, the Times repeatedly insisted on Friday that the NSA surveillance under Bush had been unprecedented, at one point citing anonymously an alleged former national security official who claimed: "This is really a sea change. It's almost a mainstay of this country that the NSA only does foreign searches."

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-248954.html

Report finds risk but supports Carnivore email surveillance

The Illinois Institute of Technology released its analysis of the FBI's controversial email surveillance system Tuesday, concluding that Carnivore technology "protects privacy and enables lawful surveillance better than alternatives."

The report said that Carnivore provides investigators with no more information than is permitted by a given court order and that it poses no risk to Internet service providers.

At the same time, the report warned that Carnivore "does not provide protections, especially audit functions, commensurate with the level of the risks," and that the lawfully collected information could be lost or corrupted by "physical attacks, software bugs or power failures."

Carnivore was designed by the FBI to track the electronic correspondence of suspects. Privacy experts have raised concerns that the program, which is installed at Internet service providers, is capable of also collecting the email of people who are not under investigation.

In response to those concerns, the Department of Justice commissioned the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) to examine the technology. In its report released Tuesday, IIT said Carnivore "reduces, but does not eliminate" the risk of unauthorized interception of electronic communication by the FBI.

"We are overall pleased with the findings," said FBI spokesman Paul Bresson. "They are quite positive and substantiate the contentions that we've made all along--that when the Carnivore system is performed accurately it only provides investigators with the information it is designed for under a court order."

Critics of Carnivore, however, said the review raised more questions than it answered.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which has sued the FBI to release its Carnivore-related documents, said the report showed that Carnivore could easily be used to collect private information not permitted under the law.

"If it's that easy for the FBI to accidentally collect too much data, imagine how simple it would be for the agents to do so intentionally," EPIC attorney David Sobel said in a statement. "This supports our belief that Carnivore raises extremely serious privacy concerns."

Even before the release of the report Tuesday, the review process itself had been under attack.

Several prominent universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), backed out of the application process after the Justice Department released the guidelines for the study, saying restrictions placed on the scope of the review took away from its independence.

When IIT was chosen to perform the review, critics said it would not be independent because the IIT reviewers were government insiders.

For example, Dean Henry H. Perritt from the university advised President Clinton's transition team on information policy. Other members of the university's review team have either worked in the past on government projects or hold active security clearances.

The Justice Department had blacked out this information when it released a document about the selected team. However, people reading the documents with Adobe software were able to view the unaltered document, which adds to suspicions about the review process.

To avoid a similar mishap, Tuesday's release of the review was delayed by several hours, said Justice representative Chris Watney. The documents are available on the DOJ's Web site.

In contrast to the conclusions in IIT's review, EPIC, which is conducting its own review, has lambasted the FBI for the program, which it describes as an invasion of privacy.

EPIC sued the FBI for information through the Freedom of Information Act and is conducting its own analysis.

In a second batch of paperwork received from the FBI last week, EPIC concluded that Carnivore can capture and archive "unfiltered" Internet traffic--contrary to FBI assertions.

"The little information that has become public raises serious questions about the privacy implications of this technology," EPIC general counsel David Sobel said in a statement. "The American public cannot be expected to accept an Internet snooping system that is veiled in secrecy."

This old disclosure should drive the stock value of the NY Slimes down even more. The liars of the Slimes can't lie anymore without getting caught in another Jayson Blair lie.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/02/24/60minutes/main164651.shtml

Ex-Snoop Confirms Echelon Network
NEW YORK March 1, 2000

Everywhere in the world, every day, people's phone calls, emails and faxes are monitored by Echelon, a secret government surveillance network. No, it's not fiction straight out of George Orwell's 1984. It's reality, says former spy Mike Frost in an interview broadcast on 60 Minutes on Sunday, Feb. 27.

More About Echelon

The ACLU has an extensive site about Echelon. Click here for Echelonwatch.

The New York Times covered the hubbub at the European Parliament. Click here for the Feb. 24 story.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has more about Echelon. Click here to see its report.

"It's not the world of fiction. That's the way it works. I've been there," Frost tells CBS News 60 Minutes Correspondent Steve Kroft. "I was trained by you guys," says the former Canadian intelligence agent, referring to the United States' National Security Agency.

The NSA runs Echelon with Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand as a series of listening posts around the world that eavesdrop on terrorists, drug lords and hostile foreign governments.

But to find out what the bad guys are up to, all electronic communications, including those of the good guys, must be captured and analyzed for key words by super computers.

That is a fact that makes Frost uncomfortable, even though he believes the world needs intelligence gathering capabilities like Echelon. "My concern is no accountability and nothing, no safety net in place for the innocent people who fall through the cracks," he tells Kroft.

As an example of those innocent people, Frost cites a woman whose name and telephone number went into the Echelon database as a possible terrorist because she told a friend on the phone that her son had "bombed" in a school play. "The computer spit that conversation out. The analystwas not too sure what the conversation was referring to, so, erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady," Frost recalls.

Democracies usually have laws against spying on citizens. But Frost says Echelon members could ask another member to spy for them in an end run around those laws.
For example, Frost tells Kroft that his Canadian intelligence boss spied on British government officials for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. "(Thatcher) had two ministers that she said, quote, 'they weren't on side,' unquote...So my boss...went to McDonald House in London and did intercept traffic from these two ministers," claims Frost. |"The British Parliament now have total deniability. They didn't do anythingWe did it for them."

America politicians may also have been eavesdropped on, says Margaret Newsham, a woman who worked at Menwith Hill in England, the NSA's largest spy station. She says she was shocked to hear the voice of U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond (R.-S.C.) on a surveillance headset about 20 years ago. "To my knowledge, all (the intercepted voices)...would be...Russian, Chinese... foreign," she tells Kroft.

The exposing of such possible abuses of Echelon will surely add to the growing firestorm in Europe over the system.

On Feb. 23, the European Parliament issued a report accusing the U.S. of using Echelon for commercial spying on two separate occasions, to help American companies win lucrative contracts over European competitors. The U.S. State Department denies such spying took place and will not even acknowledge the existence of the top secret Echelon project.

Rep. Porter Goss (R.-Fla), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which has oversight of the NSA, does acknowledge that the U.S. has the capability to pick up any phone call, and that even his own conversations could have been monitored.

But Goss says there are methods to prevent the abuse of that information. "I cannot stop the dust in the ether...but what I can make sure, is that...the capability is not abused," he tells Kroft.

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