When Your Government Monitors Your Phones and Emails--And Lies About It---What's Next?

August 19, 2013

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, EINNews.com

Confused by all those stories about whether or not the U.S. intelligence community is collecting information about who you talk with on the phone and where your Internet clicks take you?

There’s no need to be confused, but plenty of reason to be alarmed.

Yes, they most likely are collecting personal data on you. And yes, they are lying about it.

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March Oregon Senator Ron Wyden posed this direct question to national intelligence director James Clapper:

“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Under oath Clapper replied: “No, sir.” And then Clapper quickly modified his answer: “There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect [intelligence on Americans], but not wittingly.”

Enter Edward Snowden and his release of documents confirming that the National Security Agency is not only neck deep into our phone records, but into U.S. Internet traffic as well.

So Clapper had to make one more “modification” to his sworn testimony. In a subsequent TV interview, Clapper defended his answer to Wyden as “the most truthful, or least untruthful” he could give. “Least untruthful?”

When Clapper answered, “least untruthfully,” in March the White House didn’t correct his testimony. Was that because the White House didn’t know what NSA was doing? Or did the White House know and approve of having its intelligence chief lie about whether our phones calls and emails are being monitored?

President Obama tried to put a happy face on all of this two weeks ago, acknowledging that the public had legitimate questions about the surveillance programs. The President gave himself credit for launching his own review well before Snowden revealed the truth to the world. But there’s much to question about how honest the President and his intelligence team have been.

Just the other day the Washington Post disclosed, thanks to Snowden, that a NSA audit cataloged 2,776 “incidents” from March 2011 through April 2012 in which it broke its own rules about spying on Americans. That number, 2,776, may not sound like much---until you read an article by Amy Davidson in the current New Yorker Magazine.

Davidson points out “incidents” are not synonymous with individual violations. One “incident,” for example, was someone at the NSA mistaking the country code for Egypt (20) for the area code for Washington, D.C. (202) How many invasions of privacy did that create?

Another incident involved “the unlawful retention of 3,032 files that the surveillance court had ordered the NSA to destroy. Each file contained an undisclosed number of telephone call records.”

Those were just two of the 2,776 "incidents."

Davidson’s article goes on: "The audit shows that the NSA considered most of the incidents to be errors, such as 'operator error' or 'computer error.' But 'error' is a bit of a dodge. It includes categories like 'did not follow standard operating procedures,' 'training issues' and 'workload issues.'

"Also, too-broad search terms, like 'any communications that mentioned both the Swedish manufacturer Ericsson and ‘radio’ or ‘radar.’ What that seems to mean is that a great deal of private American communications are swept into databases because the NSA has people who work for it who don’t follow the rules, don’t know the rules, or are assigned tasks in a way that just leads to rules being broken. That is a structural scandal, not a mistake.”

Senator Wyden and Colorado Senator Mark Udall have been warning for years that the public would be appalled it if knew the extent of the intelligence communities’ prying into private communications. They call the latest revelations “the tip of the iceberg,” suggesting pretty strongly that there’s a lot more to know and a lot more we should know. Wyden and Udall apparently DO know, since they both are members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But because they are, they are sworn to secrecy.

Their warnings are gaining credibility because someone else sworn to secrecy, Edward Snowden, has provided documents leaving little doubt that our phones and private email are being monitored under circumstances that stretch or totally ignore the bounds Congress had in mind when it enacted the post 9/11 Patriot Act and established the FISA court to oversee it.

Meanwhile, instead of providing reasons to trust that all of this is benign, the President is being stupifyingly tone deaf to Americans’ reaction that they are being spied on by their own government.

One of the President’s proposed “reforms” is to appoint a high level committee to recommend changes. And who did he name to head the committee? James Clapper, the very official who lied to Congress. NSA made an effort to quiet concerns by having a senior official do an on-the-record interview with the Washington Post. Then the White House killed the interview and tried to get the Post to publish a boilerplate White House statement in its place, which the Post refused to do.

At his press briefing on the subject, the President suggested that Edaward Snowden could have provided his information legally. “I signed an executive order well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information that provided whistleblower protection to the intelligence community,” the President said. “So there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.”

But the way the President has reacted to Snowden's revelations is hardly convincing that he welcomes more people of “conscience” who question government actions. In fact, the President has been so furious that the U.S. can’t get its hands on Snowden that he cancelled high level talks with Russian Premier Vladimir Putin.

And what fate would await Snowden in the U.S.? WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning spent nearly a year in prison conditions so abominable that 250 U.S. law professors said those conditions amounted to torture. Manning escaped conviction on a charge that could have meant the death penalty, but he faces a lifetime in prison.

It may well be that everything the NSA and the other 16 federal agencies and 2,000 private contractors involved in intelligence work are doing is necessary, and that all of that work should remain shrouded in secrecy. But Senators Wyden and Udall don’t think so. Neither do 205 members of Congress who in late July voted to pull the plug on the phone and Internet data collection program.

What should be clear to all is that the federal government cannot continue collecting personal information about American citizens without an upfront debate on the necessity and conduct of this extraordinary invasion of individual privacy.

Edward Manning has shown that we can’t take “trust us” for an answer.

(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)