The Biggest Secret | A Review of 'State of War' by James Risen

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Published on Wednesday, February 1, 2006 by TomDispatch.com
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0201-20.htm

The Biggest Secret
by Thomas Powers


A Review of State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration by James Risen

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"This is the biggest secret I know about," one official told Risen. The eavesdropping effort is technically known as a "special access program" (SAP), which means that its existence and the information it collects are both tightly held. Within the government, Risen tells us, witting officials referred to it simply as "the program," and even the legal opinions justifying it are classified. Risen traces the origins of the program back to the brief war that overthrew the Taliban government in Afghanistan and resulted in the capture of many al-Qaeda suspects along with their cell phones and computers. These suspects had been calling and e-mailing people throughout the world, many of whom, inevitably, were in the United States, raising understandable fears of new terrorist attacks. But according to Risen, the NSA does not limit itself to monitoring numbers provided by the CIA from captured al-Qaeda phone books, targets for which there is some degree of "probable cause" to think they might be terrorist-connected. Those phone numbers provide only the jumping-off point for the program. The NSA has since broadened its effort by establishing "its own internal checklist" to pinpoint phone numbers and addresses of interest, and it is likely that the items on the list are checked off by a computer program in a nanosecond, not by analysts exercising deliberate judgment.


How big is the target list? At any given moment, Risen believes, the NSA may be "eavesdropping on as many as five hundred people in the United States...." But his number of five hundred should not be interpreted as an outer limit. The actual volume of intercepted calls is almost certainly a very great deal larger, going beyond communications between known, named persons. Modern eavesdropping seldom mirrors the classic wiretap of yesteryear when FBI agents with earphones might record hundreds of hours of a Mafia chief chatting with his underboss in New York's Little Italy. The idea now is to see if anyone on the phone in New York or New Jersey sounds in any way like a Mafia chief. A dinner of linguine with clams in a known Mafia hangout could be enough to warrant a further look. The al-Qaeda phone book numbers were the crack in the door; follow-up targets are simply numbers or e-mail addresses, leading to other numbers and e-mail addresses, all plucked from the torrents of traffic transmitted by the switching systems of the major American telecommunications companies, which daily handle two billion phone calls and perhaps ten times as many e-mail messages. What Risen discovered, in short, was a program best described as "big."


Under existing law the NSA should have sought permission from the secret FISA court in Washington before listening in on the communications of any "US persons" -- basically, American corporations, citizens, and others lawfully inside the United States -- who had turned up in al-Qaeda phone books and directories. The law makes provision for emergencies: if investigators feel they don't have time for legal rigmarole they can act first and then seek permission within the following three days. This was not done. President Bush insisted on New Year's Day that "This is a limited program... it's limited to calls from outside the United States to calls within the United States. But they are of known -- numbers of known al-Qaeda members or affiliates." But it seems clear that the NSA program quickly spilled beyond its original limits; the real reason for ignoring the FISA courts is probably a savvy guess that the courts would not approve what the administration wants to do.


Listening to specific persons was only part of it, and not the greater part. What Risen learned, which has been backed up by other press accounts in recent weeks, is that the counterterror investigators from the beginning wanted to cast the net wide -- to listen to all the people in the al-Qaeda phone books, and then broaden their search to the still wider circle of people the phone book names were in touch with, and go on to check out all their contacts as well. If the first generation of targets numbered a hundred, let's say, and each of them had been talking to a hundred people in a second generation of targets, then even a third generation search could easily sweep up a million people. You can see why investigators desperate to prevent any repetition of the attacks of September 11 would have favored this rapid and wide casting of the net, but that sort of industrial-scale fishing expedition is exactly what the FISA courts were established to prevent.

full review: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0201-20.htm

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