Piercing the confusion around NSA’s phone surveillance program
1 replies, posted
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On the third floor of the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse in downtown Washington, judges assigned to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court place their palms on a biometric hand scanner mounted next to the entrance door. Then the judges and their staff enter a code into door’s electronic cipher lock.
Inside a secure vault — one impenetrable to any sort of technical eavesdropping — the judges review some of the Justice Department’s most sensitive requests for access to private communications information, including the phone records of tens of millions of Americans, a collection that has generated significant criticism since it was disclosed in June.
The court is staffed year-round, and on an emergency basis, to authorize surveillance by the U.S. intelligence community. Although much attention has been focused on the court’s approval of the NSA’s so-called metadata phone records program, interviews with intelligence officers and experts, public statements and recently declassified documents indicate that the authorization marks the beginning of a long — and, U.S. officials say, carefully regulated — process.
That process, they say, often starts thousands of miles away. During a night raid in Kandahar, Afghanistan, U.S. Special Operations commandos might seize a computer belonging to a terrorist cell leader, for instance, and find an electronic phone book on it. An NSA linguist listening to intercepted phone calls from a terrorist in Yemen might hear him talking repeatedly to the same person about a bomb. A Saudi intelligence service might provide the cellphone number of a new, English-speaking al-Qaeda courier to the CIA station chief in Riyadh.
In each case, the numbers would trigger a search of the NSA’s vast collection of Americans’ phone records — even local calls.
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[url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/piercing-the-confusion-around-nsas-phone-surveillance-program/2013/08/08/bdece566-fbc4-11e2-9bde-7ddaa186b751_story.html]Article (Washington Post)[/url]
seems legit
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